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

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.

“Alien” Sexuality: Race, Maternity, and Citizenship

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the emergence of “problematic of alien sexuality.” I first locate discourses about “alien sexuality,” and the so‐called anchor baby in particular, within other national discourses surrounding maternity, the fetus, and citizenship. I analyze the ways that national political discourses surrounding “anchor babies” and “alien maternity” construct the “problematic of alien sexuality,” thus constituting the “alien” subject as always‐already perverse. I suggest that this production of a sexually deviant and threatening “alien” subject functions in the normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen on the one hand, and the perverse anticitizen on the other, in what I call “backwards uncitizening.” My analysis of this process shows that the perverse “alien” subject, as constituted in significant part by nonjuridical normalizing mechanisms of biopower, resists the juridical discourse that is supposed to determine it.