Fragile Families: Foster Care, Immigration, and Citizenship by Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez (review)

Recent scholarly discussions related to undocumented and unaccompanied immigrant children have centered on their experiences in school and perceptions of belonging, identity, and citizenship. Against the backdrop of President Trump's election, anti-immigration discourse is at heightened levels, nationally and locally, with the controversial Muslim ban and the comparison of immigrants to criminals, "bad hombres," and even "jihadists" in some state legislation (Rodriguez and Monreal 2017). Additionally, undocumented youth face discrimination at multiple levels of society, such as being targeted through racialized law enforcement practices and having limited access to education and other resources (Arriaga 2017, Gonzales 2016, Rodriguez and Monreal 2017). As such, the task of recent scholarship has been to expose such anti-immigrant discourse and the effects of policy on the everyday lives of immigrant children, as well as elucidate the complicated processes that immigrant children face as they navigate school and other institutions (e.g., deportation centers and children welfare services; see Heidbrink 2014). Scholars such as Gonzales (2011, 2016) have investigated the politics of being undocumented, and how the "master status of illegality" negatively impacts social mobility in the US as youth enter uncertain legal and social contexts. Other scholars have explored how those very youth engage in political activism (Rodriguez 2017).

Somewhat absent from these scholarly conversations, however, is an understanding of how individuals receive labels of migrant, orphan, unaccompanied, and so on. Also little studied are the important political and subjective processes that go into determining who is a "deserving" or "worthy" (im)migrant in contexts of international adoption—where such labels often affect the services that children receive. This intersection—between immigration, child welfare, identity, belonging, citizenship, and deservingness—is the subject of Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez's new book, Fragile Families. A major strength of this rich study is that it highlights key actors, such as social workers in foster agencies, and details their advocacy. The book importantly explores issues at the intersection of policy and institutional processes alongside lived experiences. This contributes to the literature, which often analyzes the two separately rather than considering the interplay of policy and policy agents, such as those involved in child welfare systems. The critical and often subjective role that social workers and foster agency staff play in shaping the trajectories of migrant youth bolsters existing literature.

The five chapters in this book present various stories of children as they navigate the child welfare systems in Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, CA—cities that Glenn-Levin Rodriguez calls "deeply economically entangled and socially estranged" (4). She spent four years enmeshed in the everyday goings-on of Esperanza Foster Family Agency in San Diego, working alongside social workers and advocates, and conducting interviews and participant-observation. To situate the project, Chapter 1 defines important terms, such as child migrants, and describes the implications of such labels for children. Using the stories of two children, the author unravels the complexities of child welfare services, paying specific attention to how migrant children become "worthy" and "deserving" of services while also being vulnerable to deportation threats as non-citizens.

Building upon the theme of worthiness, in Chapter 2 the author examines what has historically constituted "the best interest of the child"—a "discretionary legal framework" that enables an authority to remove children from families deemed "unworthy," often casting entire communities or groups as "abusive or neglectful through their social positioning" (49). Glenn-Levin Rodriguez argues that families that are poor or minoritized are closely associated with being "unfit." In Chapter 3, she further explores the overlapping legal and political dimensions—specifically those at the intersection of immigration enforcement and child welfare work—that create barriers to adoption and reunification. While drawing attention to the fraught systems, Glenn-Levin Rodriguez also demonstrates how advocates are able to "work the gap" between the two systems to mitigate the precarious statuses of many families.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Glenn-Levin Rodriguez examines how social workers...