"Anchor Babies" and Dreams Deferred: Public Discourse about Immigrant Children and Implications for Civic and Educational Rights

Abstract

Anchor Babies" and Dreams Deferred I don't feel sorry for these kids or parents.The parents broke the law and the kids have to pay for the sins of their parents.The vitriolic nature of these and other responses served as the impetus for this manuscript.We ask how children of immigrants are framed, viewed and treated in contemporary public discourse in the media.We do this by first considering how views of children in general have changed over time and how changing views of children and childhoods have accompanied larger historical, social and cultural transformations.We then review existing scholarship, examining public discourses about immigrants in general, and ask "where are the children?" in these analyses.This leads us to contemplate how discourses about children, childhoods, and immigrants intertwined and became evident in bloggers' responses to Orellana's essay on the Huffington Post.We examine how children are being used and positioned in ideological warfare around immigration reform, and what these views of the children of immigrants suggest about the discursive space that exists in the United States today for immigration reform, including in and around the Dream Act, which proposes routes to legalization for the 65,000+ immigrant youth who are coming of age without legal status. Views of Children and ChildhoodsWe begin with an examination of changing views of children and childhoods in recent history, in order to illustrate how particular views of children -and of particular kinds of children have both shaped and been shaped by larger social and cultural transformations.This examination will provide a base for contemplating what contemporary discourse on children of immigrants may