Heidbrink-Duerr

I thought the way Heidbrink illustrated how “unaccompanied youth,” such as Mario, are shaping the social and political landscape was very interesting. Laws, jobs, and policy have been spawned as a result of the presence of unaccompanied immigrant children in this country. Their decision to illegally immigrate has been a social and political force. She presents a new way of analyzing youth and culture, rather than looking at the way youth works against social structures, as in delinquency, or the way they are influenced by these structures, such as consumerism, Heibrink chooses to look at the way these structures are actually shaped by the existence of the immigrant children. Mario’s status as an “unaccompanied alien child” makes him an “impossible subject who cannot exist in juridical accounts of personhood due to his illegal presence in the United States and his paradoxical position as an alone but dependent minor” (p.3) his migrant illegality is “simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility-a subject barred from citizen ship and without rights.” (p.3)