Mothers,babies,and abortion at the border: Contradictory U.S. policies,or targeting fertility?

Abstract

Migrant women’s fertility—or more precisely, non-white migrant women’s fertility—has long been the subject of fear and anger in the United States. This negativity is evident in attitudes, discourse, and policies around immigration, as seen in terms such as “anchor baby,” debates over birthright citizenship, and caricatured ideas of migrant women’s reproduction and sexuality. In 2018, the Trump administration put in place a number of policies targeting migrant fertility in various ways, among them family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the denial of abortions to detained immigrant teens. This article explores the apparent contradiction of ripping immigrant families apart, while at the same time essentially forcing the production of new non-white citizens. Drawing on feminist geographic and queer studies theoretical lenses, the article identifies three fertile figures constructed in contemporary discourse around immigration: the breeder, the anchor baby, and the bad parent. This approach provides a window into the enduring white, patriarchal, heteronormative nationalism particularly evident at this point in U.S. history. It also illuminates ways in which these policies collectively work to erase the United States’ colonial past and present, and the centrality of racial hierarchies to contemporary global capitalism.

Keywords

Abortion anchor baby fertility colonial present queer theory feminist geography

Introduction

The barrage of anti-immigrant policies implemented in the United States under the administration of President Donald Trump contains an apparent contradiction. Many of these initiatives were aimed at immigrant fertility: for instance, the 2018 “zero tolerance” policy at the border, which entailed criminally charging undocumented migrants, including asylum seekers, then separating parents from their children. Parents were placed in adult-only detention facilities, and children in a quickly maxed-out system of shelters. While shocking, such initiatives are not unprecedented. In the U.S. and elsewhere, the targeting of immigrant parents, families, and children can be understood as attempts to control the bodies that literally reproduce the nation, and the products of that fertility. Simultaneously, however, the Trump administration adopted a new policy of denying pregnant immigrant teenagers detained in U.S. custody the right to obtain an abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union sued and succeeded in obtaining an injunction against the policy. Later, in September, 2020, the Trump administration officially dropped the policy (Marimow, 2020). But I was struck by the contrasting effects of these policies. Where in longstanding efforts targeting immigrant fertility to protect (white) national identity does the denial of abortions to detained largely Latinx¹ teens fit? Under the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution regarding birthright citizenship, instead of preventing Othered bodies from national incorporation, this move does the opposite, compelling the production of new non-white citizens.

To explore this apparent contradiction in policies, I employ a theoretical lens drawn from feminist political geography and queer studies to analyze media representations of immigration, statements by U.S. government officials, and U.S. federal government policies aimed at controlling immigration and immigrants. I identify three “fertile figures,” or characters/caricatures prevalent in contemporary public and political discourse around immigration: the breeder, the anchor baby, and the bad parent. These analytic strategies, collectively, shatter the initial appearance of contradiction. I argue that in addition to understanding immigration and border enforcement as reinforcing U.S. national identity as white, patriarchal, and heteronormative, U.S. policies targeting immigrant fertility collectively reveal the deliberate erasure of the United States’ colonial past and present, and the centrality of racial hierarchies to contemporary global capitalism. A feminist geographic and queer lens pushes inquiry across scales, to interrogate how geopolitical borders are embodied, as well as how immigration and border policies work to enforce normative (including national) identity categories.

Theoretical framing

My focus on fertility facilitates critical and original sociopolitical analysis. Feminist scholarship importantly focuses on various aspects of reproduction in the context of immigration and border enforcement policies, including in feminist geography (e.g. England et al., 2018; Lind and Williams, 2012; Wang, 2017; Williams and Massaro, 2016). Yet thinking about fertility spatiotemporally extends existing scholarly emphases on reproduction. Fertility is “an anticipatory weight” (Coddington, forthcoming, p. XX) that makes particular bodies the target of sociocultural anxiety and political control. A lens of fertility facilitates thinking about who is allowed to be born and conceptualized as citizens, and who is not; including not just presently fertile bodies, but also children, as bodies that may eventually become fertile. Potentially fertile bodies prompt debate over the future of the nation-state, and efforts to control fertility typically entail state control of women’s bodies. When fertile bodies become mobile across state territorial borders, they can provoke debate regarding national identity and belonging.

In this article, I explore fertility through a novel theoretical framework, combining feminist geography and queer theory to make sense of the apparent paradox of simultaneously attacking and compelling non-white immigrants’ production of potential U.S. citizens. This frame recognizes that the various immigration policies, while differing in immediate impacts and perhaps appearing contradictory, share common underlying imaginaries of national identity, power, and economic order.

I ground my focus on fertility in, first, feminist political geography’s attention to scale in understanding national processes of bordering and identity-making. Feminist geographers attend to a range of scales, with the understanding that even formal and higher-level policies are embodied in daily lives and personal experiences (i.e. Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2004; McDowell, 1999; Mountz, 2004; Smith, 2012). Examination of the body, the local, and the everyday distills how abstract political discourses and decisions shape actual experiences as well as the inseparability of the global and the intimate (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Mountz, 2010). Multi-scalar examination recognizes how national policies travel across political territorial borders and time (Hiemstra, 2019; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006). Thinking across scale therefore explores reasons underlying migration, as well as how these reasons are grounded in colonial relationships spanning decades and centuries (Hiemstra, 2019). A scaled perspective also demonstrates how the individual, gendered, sexualized, racialized body can be viewed as a threat to the nation, as well as to the international order of bordered territories.

My analysis of policies attacking immigrant fertility also draws on queer theory. Queer theory recognizes that sexuality and gender are socially constructed, and emphasizes “that sexuality encompasses everybody within dense relations of power (Luibhéid, 2014: 144, emphasis in original). By identifying sexuality as a key organizing factor in society, queer theory foregrounds the reality that particular constructions of sexuality (i.e. heterosexuality) and gender are valued above other constructions (i.e. homosexuality, gender non-conforming), and power or punishment are distributed according to adherence to dominant constructions (Butler, 1993; Luibhéid, 2014). Queer theory can be a critical tool for examining a wide range of social and political phenomena; as Juana María Rodríguez (2014) points out, sex is everywhere in law and public policy. Queer theory has also influenced interrogations of the role of normative ideas of sexuality in political relationships between and among nation-states (Richter-Montpetit, 2018; Peterson, 2020; Weber, 2016). Scholars have extended the application of queer theory beyond non-normative sexuality, employing queer theory to analyze broad social phenomena, and to call attention to and destabilize categories that underlie systems for ordering society and entrenched structures of power (Butler, 1993; Luibhéid, 2014). In other words, queer theory is not restricted to the analysis of sexuality, gender, and LGBTQ persons, questions, and issues. Feminist geography’s emphasis on scale connects to queer theory’s excavation of how normative categories are used to determine, divide, and value people in ways that shape everyday lives. I therefore weave together key tools and concepts from feminist geography and queer theory to apply my lens on fertility to migration policies, aiming to challenge existing categories and orders, and force innovative analyses.

Queer theory has created important analytical avenues to study migration (e.g. De Genova, 2010; Luibhéid, 2014; Manalansan, 2006; Shah, 2011; Somerville, 2005). Eithne Luibhéid (2014) usefully outlines three of these avenues. Here, I use scalar thinking to extend these avenues to analysis of contemporary policies targeting immigrant fertility. First, Luibhéid explains how queer theory’s centering of sexuality reveals that attempts to control and shape sexuality—and, I suggest, fertility—reflect power negotiations: “queer scholarship underscores that sexual norms and struggles always articulate hierarchies of gender, race, class, and geopolitics, which must be addressed together including when analyzing migration” (Luibhéid, 2014: 123). Sexuality and fertility are always wrapped up in larger power struggles. Extending this analysis, it prompts questions about the origin and genealogies of these power struggles and hierarchies, and their connections to geographic scales and spaces across time. As queer theory’s second contribution to migration studies, Luibhéid emphasizes that “sexual identities and categories … are not timeless, unchanging, or equivalent across cultures” (p. 123). Instead, identities and ideas of appropriate sexual behavior and desirable reproduction change across time, space, and sociopolitical borders. Fertile bodies can be understood in different ways, depending by whom, on which side of a border they are on, or in a particular political moment. Scale is critically important here, too. For example, while an individual migrant encountered personally at the local scale may evoke compassion and empathy, such feelings of connection may be erased at a national or global level—and indeed, converted to panic—through the discursive representation of large numbers of migrants ‘overwhelming’ borders and infrastructure. Third, queer theory is “an analytic strategy that calls into question taken-for-granted norms and assumptions” (Luibhéid, 2014: 123). My analytical approach thus insists on questioning dominant ideas of normalcy, and exploring how immigration policies and practices are shaped by these ideas and vice versa. Here, I apply queer theory’s questioning of norms and recognition of the malleability of sexual identities and categories to other categories intimately intertwined with sexuality, such as family form and membership, ideas of ‘proper’ parenting, and ability to participate in local to global economic orders. I extend queer theory beyond evaluation of non-normative sexuality or non-heterosexual migrants, to question norms of behavior around parenting, children, family, and reproduction.

This theoretical framework allows for consideration of questions about how immigration policy and enforcement define and reinforce markers for national belonging, not just sexual and gendered but also other markers that reaffirm dominant global economic orders and inequalities. This framework centers the contemporary effects of colonial legacies and long-entrenched power hierarchies, and focuses attention on the role of potentially fertile bodies within immigration and border enforcement. These bodies are laden with the power of present and future change at multiple scales: the power to redefine individual to national identities; to disrupt dominant normative categories related to gender, race, sexuality, class, family; to challenge hierarchies embedded in scales from the intimate to the global. In the next section, I use the composite analytical lens to explore three figures of fertility frequently constructed in and through common discourses around immigration in the United States.

Describing and analyzing three figures prevalent in representations of immigration requires examining how these figures are constructed and represented discursively. Methodologically, therefore, rather than attempting to counter discursive constructions and disprove them with empirical data, I aim to focus attention on representations of immigrants. Instead of drawing directly on empirical research relaying the voices and experiences of the people bearing the brunt of these policies, I incorporate scale through attention to how ideas of fertility—the intimate, individual potential for reproduction—can be stretched across scales to play out in national-level immigration and border policies, debates, and representations. I thus assemble my own archive, inspired by queer scholars’ practice of “queering archives” in order to create new lenses for critical cultural analysis and disrupt taken for granted norms and assumptions (Arondekar et al., 2015; Marshall et al., 2014). I draw on queer studies scholars’ strategies to excavate and explore histories and presents of queer life through reading “against the grain” (Regina Kunzel in Arondekar et al., 2015: 214), looking for absences and erasures in official archives, and pulling together original repositories for analysis (Arondekar et al., 2015; Cvetkovich, 2003; Marshall et al., 2014; Rodríguez, 2014). My task is somewhat distinct from the goal of groundbreaking queer studies scholars who search for the ephemera of non-normative sexualities and gender in existing and assembled archives (Arondekar et al., 2015; Marshall et al., 2014). I endeavor to assemble an archive that facilitates investigation of how normative ideas of national identity, gender, sexuality, and race are intertwined in discourses and policies around immigrant fertility – recognizing that immigrant fertility is paradoxically always already at or outside normative ideas of proper fertility. I also approach “queering archives” as a strategy for analyzing embodied experiences alongside discursive representations (Arondekar et al., 2015; Rodríguez, 2014), and foregrounding ongoing legacies of colonialism and institutionalized racial violence in contemporary social and political formations (Arondekar et al., 2015: 214).

The assembly of queer archives entails a process of “sifting, sorting, and prioritizing key pieces for analytical focus” (Arondekar et al., 2015: 229). By considering a variety of sources not often analyzed together—from quotes of state officials to comedy show skits—I identify and analyze the stereotypes and tropes that commonly accompany the three fertile figures. In addition to relying on existing scholarly work that has analyzed discursive representations of immigrant reproduction and sexuality, I draw on:

Popular media representations of immigration-related events and trends, including news accounts and widely available video entertainment. From these, I primarily extract references to or examples of common popular discourse pertaining to the three figures.

Verbal or written statements by U.S. government officials, at the local level, and from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of federal government, which are representative of political discourse, and, I believe, the opinions, assumptions, and convictions of significant segments of the U.S. population.

Policies carried out by the U.S. federal government that aim to (or do in effect) control aspects of immigrants’ lives and fertility. I consider laws, constitutional provisions, executive orders, and practices enacted at the national level (with, of course, often intimate scale consequences) that somehow target immigrant fertility, viewing them as both consequence of and contributor to negative representations of immigrants in public and political discourse.

Because I consider the mobilization and development of the three figures throughout U.S. history, my archive spans the late 1800s to the present day, with focus on moments when anti-immigrant discourse crystallizes into specific policies targeting at least one of the three figures. This unavoidably selective and partial archive has been assembled to facilitate cross-scalar analysis—to trace discourse in and to national level policies—and to expose the role of both policy and discourse around immigrant fertility in reinforcing norms and power hierarchies.

Three fertile figures

In a 3 November 2018 skit on Saturday Night Live spoofing the FoxNews show The Ingraham Angle, comedian Kate McKinnon played archconservative Laura Ingraham in a segment conveying hysteria about the roughly 5000 person migrant caravan headed toward the U.S.-Mexico border from Honduras. In her opening remarks, Ingraham (as parodied by McKinnon) explains she is reporting live from the Arizona border, where “a vicious caravan of dozens, maybe millions of illegal immigrants is headed straight for you and your grandchildren.” Later, Ingraham speaks with Trump supporter Sheriff David Clarke, played by Kenan Thompson, who reports “We’ve also learned that all the women in the caravan are more than nine months pregnant, and they’re holding the babies in until the exact moment when they cross over the border. And then, they’re gonna literally drop anchor. And the babies—get this—are pregnant!”

While providing a moment of comic relief, this skit highlights dominant caricatures that surface frequently in anti-immigrant discourse and debates, caricatures infused with fears of immigrant fertility. Inspired by Eithne Luibhéid’s (2002: xv) identification of “dangerous peripheral sexual figures” of the late 1800s and early 1900s, I identify three fertile figures commonly present in discussions about and portrayals of racialized immigrants. Here, I understand “figures” as products of public imagination and fear, embodied into exaggerated caricatures laden with negative stereotypes, assumptions, and associations. These figures are constructed by politicians drumming up both support and hysteria, entities invested financially in the criminalization of immigrants, and media outlets elevating particular stories to fill the 24-hour news cycle (elements together termed the “immigration industrial complex” by Tanya Golash-Boza [2009] and others). These fertile figures are the breeder, the anchor baby, and the bad parent. Applying feminist geography’s attention to scale and queer theory highlights seemingly contradictory government policies related to fertility and reveals the histories, social norms, and power hierarchies behind them.

The breeder and the anchor baby

The figures of the immigrant breeder and the anchor baby are intimately intertwined with American hierarchies of race, class, and gender. As Leo Chavez (2013: 74) puts it, “Fears of immigrants’ sexuality and their reproductive capacities are not new. Race, immigration, and fertility have formed a fearsome trinity for much of U.S. history.” Policies aimed at immigrant women and children affirm and shore up the racial foundations of national identity. The figure of the immigrant “breeder” is typically a young Latinx woman, heavily pregnant and/or sexualized, plotting to drop multiple babies in the United States. The “anchor baby” is the infant or young child born in the U.S. to an immigrant woman, with the assumption that the mother is using the baby to obtain citizenship and/or access services like healthcare and welfare. Both of these figures, as glibly demonstrated in the Saturday Night Live skit, are woven into discourses about immigrants taking over the United States, refusing to “assimilate,” ab/using U.S. generosity, and “sneaking” across the U.S.-Mexico border. Both the breeder and the anchor baby underpin questions about citizenship, and concerns about scarcity of resources and behavior that falls outside neoliberal, individual resourcefulness.

The caricature of the immigrant breeder has characterized numerous immigrant groups throughout time, as explained by a (news outlet) CNN analyst: “The ‘breeding’ fear has been affixed to Jews from Eastern Europe, Catholics from Ireland and Italy, Chinese and, now, Latinos, Filipinos, Africans, and Haitians” (Wolf, 2018: np). The breeder should be placed within the United States’ long history of endeavoring to control the reproduction of all women according to how different groups are valued—always supporting the evolving idea of American whiteness. Under sometimes explicitly eugenicist logics, the state has pursued a variety of policies to intervene in both immigrant and citizen reproduction. These have included holding benefits and aid hostage to demands regarding fertility and parenting, and forced or coerced sterilization and birth control (Briggs, 2002; Davis, 1983; Lindsley, 2002; Mink, 2002; Roberts, 2017). Women of color receiving U.S. government-funded health care have been systematically subject to mass sterilization. In the 1960s and 70s, sterilization programs targeted Mexican immigrant women, Black women, and Native American women (Davis, 1983; Theobald, 2019). Women in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico became guinea pigs to test the early birth control pill without informed consent in the 1950s and 60s, with detrimental outcomes including sterilization and even death (Briggs, 2002). These actions to halt the reproduction of women of color overlap with policies that seemingly force reproduction. After the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, in 1976 Congress enacted the Hyde Amendment, still in place today, which prohibits the use of government funds for abortion and has disproportionately impacted women of color (Davis, 1983; Theobald, 2019). Control of immigrant fertility is tied to the cultivation of this racialized national identity (Cisneros, 2013; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013; Lindsley, 2002; Luibhéid, 2002). Immigrant women and children constructed as non-white evoke fears of the loss of white supremacist social, economic, and political rule, and policies have been made accordingly, such as the Chinese Exclusion Laws of the late 1800s (Lindsley, 2002; L. Chavez, 2013; Luibhéid, 2002; Shah, 2011; Somerville, 2005; Takaki, 2008).

The Latinx population has long caused anxiety among the powerful, including invented ideas of the sexual behavior and fertility of Latinx women (Briggs, 2002; Luibhéid, 2002). The figure of the breeder is often explicitly invoked in language and image. “The breeder,” for example, is actually the name of a character at whom players can shoot in the Flash video game “Border Patrol” that came out in the early 2000s (L. Chavez, 2013; Silverstein, 2006). In 2018, commenting about California sanctuary policies, President Trump tweeted “There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo [sic] many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infected & breeding concept … ” (as reported in Wolf, 2018: np). The breeder is also euphemized in various ways. In recent decades the fear of non-white Latinx population growth has taken the form of what Leo Chavez (2013) calls the “Latino Threat” narrative, in which Latinxs are discursively framed as attempting to over-run the United States amidst concern about declining white fertility. One manifestation of this fear was the “reconquista” (reconquest) narrative postulated by conservative pundits particularly in the 2000s; for example, on Lou Dobbs’ FoxNews show in 2006, guest Pat Buchanan stated that “The ultimate goal of [then President] Vicente Fox is the erasure of the border between the United States and Mexico … La Reconquista is the objective” (Waldman et al., 2008: np). In 2015 and 2016, Donald Trump found traction in his Presidential campaign through anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Latinx, remarks, including those that suggested Latinxs were overwhelming the “true” U.S. population. At one rally, he accused Mexicans of “taking our jobs. They’re taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us” (Politi, 2015: np). Ideas of the U.S. citizen population being overtaken link to alarm about presumed overproduction of children by Latinx women.

As the product of the breeder, anchor babies are “characterized as undeserving citizens because they are part of a devious plot cooked up by their undocumented parents to circumvent the laws of the United States” (L. Chavez, 2013: 193). Anger towards the anchor baby figure, as for the breeder, is grounded in longstanding racial hierarchies and white supremacy. Juana María Rodríguez (2014: 35) points out:

… Latin@ reproduction, projected through the discourse of Mexican ‘anchor babies’ serves as the ever-present threat against which Anglo-American whiteness must assert its disciplinary mechanisms. These children are never the imagined future subjects of the nation, and the forms of disciplinary power these children inspire operate differentially not only at the level of the symbolic, but also at the level of the material and the juridical.

Anchor babies, therefore, should be excluded from the protections theoretically awarded to (white) citizen children in the liberal democratic imaginary.

“Anchor babies” have long been the target of conservative commentators and politicians. This figure was frequently invoked during debates over California’s Proposition 187, passed in 1994, which targeted public services, health services, and prenatal care for immigrant women and children. One of the organizers behind Proposition 187 said of Latina immigrants, “They come here, they have their babies, and after that they become citizens and all those children use social services” (as quoted by L. Chavez, 2013: 75). While Proposition 187 was eventually overturned in court, it became a blueprint for many other state laws and 1996 federal immigration legislation. References to anchor babies were prevalent in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his continued anti-immigrant rhetoric after becoming President. In a 2015 interview Trump discussed ending birthright citizenship, saying “What happens is they’re in Mexico, they’re going to have a baby, they move over here for a couple of days, they have the baby” (as reported in Wolf, 2018: np). Other terms used by Trump and his supporters link to the immigrant breeder and anchor baby figures, such as “chain migration” and “birth tourism” (Lyons, 2019).

Fears of immigrant fertility and anger at immigrants’ assumed undeservingness—embodied in the breeder and anchor baby figures—play out in discussions of immigrants taking advantage of government services and the erroneous belief that immigrants don’t pay taxes (Waldman et al., 2008). These beliefs conflict with neoliberal ideas of self-sufficiency and the myth that hard work will be rewarded, and they materialize in policies targeting receipt of aid. For instance, in the 1996 laws, legal immigrants were prohibited from using food stamps (undocumented were already prohibited), and states were allowed to deny services to immigrants (Lindsley, 2002). The fears embedded in the breeder and the anchor baby also manifest in debates about “public charge,” interpreted as someone dependent on government support, with the consequence that anyone characterized as a public charge can be denied residency and citizenship. As Luibhéid (2002) documents, in the 1800s and early 1900s young women from “undesired” groups from Asia and Europe were commonly excluded from entry to the United States, often with the reasoning that they would become pregnant and need government assistance. In the landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that gave amnesty to roughly 2.7 million immigrants, women and children who had participated in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program were excluded from receiving amnesty under “public charge” reasoning (L. Chavez, 2013; Luibhéid, 2002). The Trump administration’s expansion in 2020 of what constitutes a “public charge” specifically targeted parents and children: use of nutritional programs and food subsidies, subsidized healthcare and insurance programs, and subsidized housing (Lind, 2018; Weixel, 2020).

The breeder and anchor baby figures also tie to fears that (racially different) immigrants will overwhelm local governments’ capacities to care for their own citizens (Gorman, 2021). The Trump administration implemented new visa rules in 2020 to limit the legal travel of pregnant women from particular countries to the United States; in a statement about the change, the White House press secretary explained it would “defend American taxpayers from having their hard-earned dollars siphoned away to finance the direct and downstream costs associated with birth tourism. The integrity of American citizenship must be protected” (Lee and Long, 2020: np). The Trump administration’s October 2019 executive order that every city had to expressly agree to resettle refugees also links to fears of finite resources being (ab)used by immigrants. A resident in one Minnesota town that voted no to allowing refugees stated, “We’re on a cliff. We can’t even support the people we have” (Enger, 2020: audio 00:59).

The breeder and anchor baby figures also work together to undermine cultural ideas of childhood innocence (Lind and Williams, 2012; Williams and Massaro, 2016) in ways that promote policies that do not protect and even harm children. For example, ICE, under both the Obama administration (Medrano, 2014) and the Trump administration (Johnson et al., 2018.) has dropped off immigrant families, including small children, at bus stations, often unfed, with inappropriate clothing, and without any information or money. Read as older iterations of anchor babies and the offspring of breeders, immigrant children of color—no matter their legal status—are assumed to be tainted, unworthy of membership, permanent outsiders. Despite the social valorization and collective goal of protecting the child underlying American politics (Edelman, 2004), the children who are actually exalted are white and middle- or upper-class (Rodríguez, 2014). Particularly in the post-9/11 milieu, criminalized and racialized children are re-framed as threats to the nation (Martin, 2011; Williams and Massaro, 2016). And as the “illegal” offspring of demonized parents with bad intentions, they become subject to cruel government responses such as family separation and child detention, practices which become normalized as acceptable state responses to crisis (Mountz and Hiemstra, 2014). Today, a figure that could be called the “gangbanger” has emerged as a new caricature of the immigrant child used to rationalize violent responses: the teenager assumed to be a present or future gang member (Hlass and Prandini, 2018). The figure of the gangbanger has appeared amidst the panic around unaccompanied minors entering the United States, as evident in remarks to federal law enforcement officials by Attorney General Jeff Sessions (U.S. Department of Justice, 2017: np),

We are now working with the Department of Homeland Security and HHS [Health and Human Services] to examine the unaccompanied minors issue and the exploitation of that program by gang members who come to this country as wolves in sheep clothing. In fact the gang uses this program as a means by which to recruit new members.

The narrative that any Central American child is corruptible is used to justify surveillance, arrest, detention, and deportation of migrant teens—paradoxically often trying to escape the very gang activity of which they are accused. The breeder and anchor baby figures thus fuse to panicked constructions like the gangbanger, the chain migrant, the fake asylum seeker. They embody fears of non-white invasion, takeover, unearned benefits, and exhaustion of resources.

The bad parent

Feminist and queer scholars have pointed out that attacks on immigrant women and children are more than simply efforts to control the racial profile of the nation. Amy Lind and Jill Williams (2012: 101–102), for example, write that in the “paradoxical space” of border regions, “women’s bodies become battlegrounds upon which struggles for economic development, capitalist profit, and heteropatriarchal dominance are waged.” Policies targeting immigrant fertility are profoundly wrapped up in the maintenance of existing racial, sexual, and patriarchal power hierarchies, as well as the domestic and global capitalist order.

Here, I identify the figure of the bad immigrant parent to facilitate a deeper, broader understanding of how and why immigrant fertility is both targeted and wielded against vulnerable immigrant populations. The bad immigrant parent fails at being a parent in multiple senses. It is the parent who is portrayed as parenting poorly, as being selfish, of using and abusing their children. The parent who is not normal, who falls outside a heteronormative, classed, raced, gendered, sexualized American ideal. The parent who does not fit within U.S. neoliberal, capitalist economic and sociocultural frames. The parent who does not exhibit appropriate and expected reproductive behaviors, in accordance with sociopolitical borders. The parent who does not adhere to the globally established—through and since colonial times—hierarchies of nationality, race, and location. In sum, the bad immigrant parent is the parent who dares to challenge local to global hierarchies by being out of place, the parent who embodies the violent consequences of global inequalities and national policies at an intimate scale, at or within U.S. borders. The bad parent figure overlaps with the breeder but encourages additional analysis of the regulation and valuing of the immigrant parent.

Exploration of the bad parent figure draws attention to the role of immigration policing in the constant production of American white heteropatriarchy. This most obviously has to do with the exclusion of non-heterosexual and gender non-conforming immigrants (Coleman, 2008; Luibhéid, 2002). It also has to do with how immigration enforcement has been tied to the maintenance of ‘proper’ heterosexuality, including the exclusion of non-whites from the privileges typically afforded white heterosexual individuals (Luibhéid, 2002; Montegary, 2018; Shah, 2011). Chinese Exclusion Laws in the late 1800s were linked to fears that Chinese women were naturally inclined to sex work (despite the reality that more white women were sex workers), immoral, and likely to corrupt others (Luibhéid, 2002; Shah, 2003; Takaki, 2008). Similarly, particular paradoxical (and incorrect) ideas about Latina fertility and sexuality are central to the “Latino Threat” narrative: that Latinas are promiscuous and seductive while simultaneously culturally compelled to have a lot of children (L. Chavez, 2013). The public and political denigration of Japanese “picture brides” (in marriages arranged by a matchmaker between male immigrants and women from their country of origin) in the early 1900s is an example of how even legally established heterosexual marriage—as supposedly the standard at the center of traditional American identity—can be twisted into something dangerous and threatening in public discourse (Luibhéid, 2002; Takaki, 2008). In addition to reinforcing racial hierarchies, the emphasis on immigrant sexual deviance—such as the portrayal of female immigrants as promiscuous, sex workers, or illegitimate spouses --- contributes to the promotion of white middle class heterosexual women as superior, the norm, the most suited in mothering and femininity (Briggs, 2002; K. Chávez, 2013; L. Chavez, 2013; Lindsley, 2002, Luibhéid, 2002; Salazar Parreñas, 2017; Shah, 2003, 2011). The bad immigrant parent figure, then, exists both in contrast to and to reinforce the constructed ideal; the bad parent embodies at the individual scale white supremacist, patriarchal fears of erosion of national identity.

Queer studies scholars further argue that the policing of race and sexuality occurs together with the policing of class borders in ways critical to national identity (K. Chávez, 2013; Montegary, 2018; Rodríguez, 2014; Shah, 2003, 2011). Karma Chávez (2013: 11) insists, “Whiteness and heterosexuality coupled with middle-class gender norms have always had an interdependent relationship.” This has implications for state control of fertility and reproduction. Juan María Rodríguez (2014: 36–7) notes how “proper reproductive adulthood is already marked by race and class,” and is not inclusive of people falling outside of dominant social norms to do with sexuality, ability, immigration status, family composition, or what she terms queer families (see also Montegary, 2018). One’s abilities and rights as a parent are evaluated by the state according to how one measures up in a heteronormative hierarchy, in which the most valued family is white, traditionally abled, middle or upper class, financially stable, heterosexual, co-habiting, and two-parent (Lindsley, 2002; Mink, 2002; Rodríguez, 2014). The middle- and upper-class positioning of the U.S. white citizen woman depends on the Othered immigrant woman. Syd Lindsley (2002: 189) explains, “The dichotomy between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ women allows for the simultaneous exploitation of the wage labor of poor women, immigrant women, and women of color with the privileging of white women’s motherhood and the white middle-class family” (see also Salazar Parreñas, 2017). In the figure of the bad immigrant parent, capability and value are tied to financial stability and independence, and immigrant parents are assessed in an already-existing, idealized class hierarchy that de facto places them at the bottom.

Conceptualization and regulation of immigrant parents—and their ability/right to be parents—also interlock with capitalist imaginaries. Capitalism is tightly woven with racism, heteronormativity, and classism (Bhattacharyya, 2018; K. Chávez, 2013; Montegary, 2018; Shah, 2011). Scholars have used the term “racial capitalism” to signal the critical role of racism in capitalist development, historically and to the present (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 2000). Gargi Bhattacharyya (2018) highlights the central importance of reproductive labor to capitalism, and the role of racism in hiding the importance of that labor. In the predominant hierarchy, reproductive labor (work often conducted in the private sphere, such as cleaning, cooking, and childcare) is typically gendered as female and racialized as non-white (Lindsley, 2002; Pettman, 1996; Salazar Parreñas, 2017), in ways that not only devalue the labor of many immigrants but also contribute to the judgment of immigrants as bad parents. Furthermore, particularly within neoliberal capitalism, individuals are assessed based on their ability to achieve economic success, with no acknowledgement of the ways in which pre-existing power hierarchies (of race, class, sexuality, gender, place) limit opportunities; this neoliberal “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality further shapes the formulation of the bad immigrant parent figure.

These power-infused measures of “good” vs. “bad” parent play out starkly in recent examples. In 2007, immigrant mother Encarnación Bail Romero was detained in a raid on a chicken processing factory in Missouri, at which time the government took her eleven month old son into custody and placed him with a white couple who moved to adopt him. Romero then fought a long court battle trying to re-gain custody of her son, eventually exhausting all options in 2012. One of the judges who supported the termination of Romero’s parental rights wrote, “illegally smuggling herself into the country is not a lifestyle that can provide any stability for the child” (quoted in Ross and Hill, 2012: np). Romero’s construction as the bad parent, particularly in comparison to the white, two-parent, middle class, economically stable family, was central to losing her son; Romero’s efforts to surmount the territorial and economic barriers of global capitalism through immigration were buried in the figure of the bad parent. Likewise in defenses of President Trump’s 2018 family separation policy, in which children and parents were separated after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, parents were portrayed as selfish and unworthy. As summarized by The New York Times reporter Caitlin Dickerson, some border agents carrying out the separations “felt like they were protecting the kids, because they felt parents had been so irresponsible in bringing them on this dangerous journey that they were actually unfit to take care of children” (Correal and Dickerson, 2018: audio 10:30–10:45). Similarly, the depiction of migrant caravans of families and children as an invasion—as parodied in the Saturday Night Live skit—is dependent on the figure of the bad parent. President Trump characterized people traveling in caravans as nefarious, criminal outsiders, as in this October 2018 tweet: “You got some bad people in those groups, you got some tough people in those groups, and I’ll tell you what: This country does not want them” (quoted in Bixby, 2018: np). This portrayal was central to the Trump administration’s adoption of the “zero tolerance” policy that entailed separating parents and children; it relied on a refusal to see parents trying to bring their kids to safety, or to places better positioned within the global capitalist system, instead seeing them as incapable parents with ill intentions.

Not so contradictory policies

The negative portrayals of immigrants promoted by these three fertile figures have multiple functions. First, subscription to these figures justifies sidestepping protections for groups conceptually protected by traditional American values: the mother, the child, the family (though never fully in practice, as seen in the historical treatment of indigenous, African American, and immigrant children) (Martin, 2011; Rodríguez, 2014; Williams and Massaro, 2016). The arrival of many families and children at the border conflicts with the U.S. immigration system’s emphasis on family migration and reunification. As Jill Williams and Vanessa Massaro (2016: 92) surmise regarding the arrival of migrant families with children since 2014, “The ‘problem’ of unauthorised families represents a growing gap between cultural ideologies regarding childhood innocence and the dominant cultural logics and nationalist frameworks through which immigration enforcement policies and practices are designed and implemented.” Second, the breeder, anchor baby, and bad immigrant parent figures—and the targeting of immigrant fertility—are tightly interwoven with neoliberal imaginaries, capitalist goals, and the regulation of labor. The demonization of immigrant parents and children is integral to the elevation of the white, heteronormative, two-parent family as the key family form for capitalist production (Bhattacharyya, 2018; K. Chávez, 2013; Montegary, 2018; Shah, 2011). This demonization also contributes to the maintenance of the existing social order in the United States, in which men are viewed as the most appropriate occupants of the public sphere, and women of the private sphere—and white men and women as at the top of longstanding racialized power hierarchies (Pettman, 1996). These fertile figures thus obscure and bolster the racist, patriarchal, and heteronormative foundations undergirding U.S. political, economic, and social structures.

Additionally, I argue, these three figures embody the colonial past and present. Their existence allows the United States to ignore responsibility for its role in creating contemporary conditions driving mass immigration, and erases continuing histories of violent intervention and colonization. The figures are therefore demonstrative of—and intertwined with—continuing colonial hierarchies, of empire’s dependence on and collapse without its modern-day colonies and colonized bodies (Briggs, 2002; Lee, 2019; Peterson, 2020; Reddy, 2011). The United States has been intimately involved in Latin American and Caribbean countries for decades (in some cases centuries) through direct and indirect military, political, and economic intervention. The existence and placement of territorial borders that are so fiercely defended occurred as a result of deception and violence, a prime example being the 1848 U.S. takeover of a significant amount of Mexican territory to create the American southwest region (Takaki, 2008). Stereotypes around gender, sexuality, family, and race have been at the center of justifications for these interventions (Anzaldúa, 1987; Takaki, 2008). The United States has supported brutal dictatorships and military governments, imposed neoliberal economic systems, and coerced enlistment in global capitalist regimes that contribute to broad local-level poverty. Collectively, these interventions have contributed to an unstable region characterized by weak, corrupt governments, drastic inequalities and poverty, and unchecked violence. Latin Americans’ decisions to migrate as well as their experiences of violence in transit are tied to these neocolonial, raced, sexualized hierarchies of power (Hiemstra, 2019; Lee, 2019; Riva, 2017; Torres, 2018).

The three figures, particularly the bad parent, interlock with neoliberal ideas of individual independence (with both economic and cultural implications) to obscure drivers of immigration. As Williams and Massaro (2016: 92) suggest, “The criminalisation of migration and migrants has been made possible by overarching neoliberal ideologies of personal responsibility that disregard the larger structural factors that compel unauthorised migration.” Erasure is also evident in requirements for asylum seekers. A ritual of testimony is demanded of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, in which the migrant is expected—indeed, required—to portray the home country in a colonial frame as backward and in need of rescue (Giametta, 2015; Gorman, 2016; Luibhéid, 2002). Eithne Luibhéid (2002: 114) explains, “ … the process provides an opportunity to (re)construct colonialist, nationalist contrasts between the United States and other countries—while disavowing the United States’ central role in creating and sustaining oppression in other countries, and minimizing the forms of oppression that are experienced by people who live in the United States.” The Trump administration’s 2018 declaration that sexual and domestic violence, as well as gang-related violence, is outside the purview of asylum (Gorman, 2021; Zapotsky, 2018) both ignores U.S. culpability in the creation of social, political, and economic climates in which violences driving migration flourish, and affirms the United States as a more civilized, moral, and secure place. When the figures are made to loom large, they cast shadows that block these histories and hierarchies from view.

I now return to the apparent contradiction with which I began: anti-immigrant ideologues abhor and fear the non-white immigrant parent and child, yet endeavor to force a detained immigrant teen to have a child by denying her an abortion. Collectively, a feminist and queer analysis of the three fertile figures I have discussed—the immigrant breeder, anchor baby, and bad parent—frames these attempts to control immigrant fertility as reinforcement of normative identity categories and national identity, the gendered embodiment of geopolitical borders, and the maintenance of the global capitalist regime, rather than a contradiction.

In dissecting this perceived paradox, defenses of the abortion policy should be acknowledged but then recognized as camouflage for the exacerbation of hardship for these detained immigrant teens. First, there is not substantive weight to officials’ claim that these teens could “self-deport” if they really wanted an abortion; they are certainly aware that abortions are illegal in the home countries of most of these immigrants (Foley and Bassett, 2017). Second, religious and moral justifications for preventing the desired abortions can also be exposed as hollow. The Trump-appointed (former) Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement who put the policy in place, Scott Lloyd, is a longtime abortion opponent for reasons he ties to religious convictions (Foley and Bassett, 2017; Leonard, 2018). Abortion opponents often claim that the denial of abortion is about protection of the unborn child. However, adherence to this claim requires willfully ignoring research about the relationship between systemic racism, poverty, and unintended pregnancy. In reality, poor women who become single mothers due to restrictions on abortion are unlikely to pull themselves or their children out of poverty (Oberman, 2018; Shepherd and Turner, 2018), appearing to justify their exclusion from neoliberal capitalist imaginaries of success, as well as culturally dominant ideas of successful womanhood and motherhood.

In the case of undocumented immigrant women, the hypocrisy underlying claims of protecting the unborn is glaring. Denial of prenatal care (vital to the health of a baby) for immigrant women is written into federal law. ICE officials have adopted policies of depositing pregnant women near birth at shelters or bus stations (Williams and Massaro, 2016). Then, the professed desire to protect the unborn child systematically evaporates after the child is born; often the same policymakers who fight abortion work to withhold health care, education, and childcare for immigrant children (Williams and Massaro, 2016). For example, the Trump administration’s changes in public charge rules discourage undocumented as well as documented immigrant parents from seeking government assistance of any kind for their U.S. citizen children. Furthermore, many policymakers who would deny an immigrant woman an abortion simultaneously seek her deportation—along with the child she was forced to have—to the most violent regions of the world.

Analysis of the three figures through our feminist and queer lens facilitates understanding the act of forcing an immigrant woman to have a child as actually emblematic of persistent colonial logics and global inequalities grounded in hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality. The prohibition of abortion to a detained immigrant teen is about the reinforcement of national borders and the rights bestowed accordingly. It is the denial of citizen rights to racialized, gendered Others, as evident in Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson’s dissenting opinion in the D.C. Circuit court’s ruling allowing detained teens’ abortions. She disagreed with the opinion that undocumented persons have the same rights as citizens, stating “To conclude otherwise rewards lawlessness and erases the fundamental difference between citizenship and illegal presence in our country” (quoted in Sacchetti and Marimow, 2017: np). Controlling fertility is terrain upon which those in power assert moral high ground, which (in this logic) gives the asserters the right to dominate those whom they see as inferior. U.S. citizens see themselves as morally superior, deserving of the right to control life and death, and perhaps even divinely charged with this right. Racialized, gendered immigrants are not allowed agency, and the white man elevates himself as savior of brown, inferior, child-like savages. The denial of abortion is thus also wrapped up in the preservation of the existing heteronormative patriarchal order, including particular beliefs about women’s role and rights, and the assertion of control over women’s bodies.

Furthermore, a feminist and queer lens facilitates seeing the denial of abortions to detained immigrant teens as—instead of a contradiction—a glaring example of the constant, willful smokescreening of U.S. responsibility. U.S. border and immigration policies, particularly those aimed at ‘deterrence,’ directly contribute to death and violence, including sexual assault, for migrants in transit (Lind and Williams, 2012; Luibhéid, 2002; Nevins, 2010; Torres, 2018). It is estimated that 80% of women reaching the U.S.-Mexico border are raped during their journey (Bonello and McIntyre, 2014). The refusal to consider the potential circumstances of an unwanted pregnancy is a deliberate obliteration of the gendered violence of migration decisions and journeys, as well as U.S. responsibility for conditions enabling those violences. Eithne Luibhéid (2002: 128) argues, “By blaming undocumented immigrants for their own victimization, while ignoring the larger structures that condition immigration, the violence of the government that is visible at the border and that produces categories of people as ‘illegal,’ rapable, and otherwise exploitable becomes disavowed.” In the refusal to consider both the drivers of undocumented migration and violences of migration journeys, the U.S. state and public expunge the colonial past and solidify the colonial present.

Finally, analysis of the three figures with a lens attentive to both scale and normative identity categories across geopolitical borders reveals that to read the Trump administration’s attempt to stop abortions for detained immigrants as a break from previous immigration policy norms is too simple. There is a long history of immigration discourses and policies in which racialized migrant groups were never legible as rightful parents or conceptualized as capable of forming families worthy of protection. Even after U.S. immigration law began to favor family reunification, it operated to privilege families constructed as white and to reinforce white heteronormative nationalism. In contrast, family-centric policies have typically been a mechanism of social control for non-white migrants, and a strategy for maintaining families in self-sustaining units to minimize potential reliance on the state (Montegary, 2018).² Furthermore, these apparent contradictions arise in an era of nation-state political systems existing at the same time as capitalist economic systems. Nation-states form around the idea of sovereign borders, endeavoring to have secure borders and a racially pure nation. Capital seeks open borders and requires a constant supply of exploitable labor to thrive, and globalized capitalism feeds inequalities between nations in ways that fuel human mobility. These competing objectives play out in the appearance of conflicting immigration and border policies, which can be read as symptomatic of enduring systems of hierarchy and control within and across borders.

This article has explored three negative fertile figures prominent in representations of immigrants—the breeder, anchor baby, and bad parent—by pulling together key ideas of feminist geography and queer theory. This theoretical approach pushes scholars to center attention to multiple scales across time and borders, embodied effects of policies, and how normative categories both shape and are shored up by policy and discursive responses to immigration. This approach thus recognizes apparent contradictions as key entry points for critical analysis. In September 2020, a whistleblower alleged potentially more than twenty primarily Latinx immigrant women held in a Georgia detention facility were subjected to hysterectomies through deceit and coercion (Olivares and Washington, 2020). The immediate effect of this practice—permanently removing the ability to have a child—is the opposite of denying abortions, and initially adds to the perception of contradictory policies regarding fertility. A feminist and queer lens, however, facilitates understanding this incident not as a contradiction, but as an attack on all three fertile figures; it is a direct assault on the breeder and anchor baby figures, justified by the figure of the bad immigrant parent. Racialized immigrant women were stripped of their ability to reproduce in defense of the borders of white heteropatriarchal national identity, the neoliberal capitalist order, and the neocolonial past and present. We can understand all attacks on immigrant fertility—whether to curtail or compel—as a continuation of racist histories of population control. Immigrants’ bodies and reproductive capacities become a mechanism for the exacerbation of hardship and the reinforcement of borders and orders. The immediate result is irrelevant, be it production of new life, removal of the ability to produce life, or the destruction of families.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-epc-10.1177_2399654421998368 - Supplemental material for Mothers, babies, and abortion at the border: Contradictory U.S. policies, or targeting fertility?

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-epc-10.1177_2399654421998368 for Mothers, babies, and abortion at the border: Contradictory U.S. policies, or targeting fertility? by Nancy Hiemstra in EPC: Politics and Space

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Enormous thanks to Kate Coddington for input on multiple drafts and bringing this article and Special Issue to publication. I am profoundly grateful to Liz Montegary and Alexandra Novitskaya for literature suggestions and helpful feedback on early drafts of this article. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers for their constructive and engaged comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nancy Hiemstra

Notes

Nancy Hiemstra is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. She is a feminist political and cultural geographer whose research focuses on immigration enforcement policies, changing ideas of borders, and patterns of migration in Latin America. She is the author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime (2019, University of Georgia Press) and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She co-edited with Deirdre Conlon Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention: Critical Perspectives (2016, Routledge).

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