States depend on the consent of the governed: there are only a finite number of cops, and politicians, once stripped of authority and armed guards, are about as liable to die from gunshot wounds or immolation as anyone else. The deepest wish of the modern state is to forge precisely the sort of population which might perfectly support it.
The cruder versions of this practice are arithmetical. Fostering the right sort of births from the right sort of families, the inclusion of the right sort of immigrants from acceptable countries: such enlargements are addition. Genocide, forced disappearances, and summary executions represent subtraction. These are brutish tools of the state.
But the operation the state truly longs to master is not arithmetical but algorithmic. For the state, this is the philosopher’s stone, the perpetual motion machine, the good shit: not to increase or decrease a people but transform it. Residential schools and re-education camps, de-radicalization and assimilation, nation-building and detention centers--we could keep going. The dream of the state is to build a machine which could transmute one type of citizen into another. In those halcyon days when Manhattan’s towers still smoldered, some even believed that such machines could be packed up for export and deployed, with suppressive fire, in the middle of Kabul or Baghdad or Pyongyang.
The trouble is that, despite decades of field trials, the machines just aren’t that good. States, of all varieties, keep feeding in people, but the results remain inconsistent at best. Sometimes it works, and model citizens are manufactured. Other times, the people who emerge are just traumatized versions of those who entered. In the very worst cases, the machines spew out embittered individuals who keep suspiciously glancing at critical national infrastructure. There are entire peoples that each state struggles to digest, those of inauspicious nationalities, suspect cultures, or doubtful pedigree: populations resistant to correction and regulation, grit in the machine.
But when the machine is fed children, it nearly always functions perfectly. The child of a subversive whistles the national anthem on the way home from school. The immigrant parent finds their accent mocked by offspring who dream only in the coarse tongue of their hostile new home. The foreign child is a perfect input, a blank slate to mold into a citizen as easily as one might the native-born. The child of the most unbecoming parentage can become cleansed, perfected, born anew. Such profound thaumaturgy is concealed behind words like “belonging,” “inclusion,” “charity,” and “home.” Any act of malfeasance required to facilitate a metamorphosis so sublime is surely forgivable: a kidnapping never given the name, a mother never given a grave.
To build the machine is the dream of each contemporary state. To feed it the children of the world is the privilege of empire.
The formal phase of the War on Terror died with images of birth: Afghan babies passed over the Kabul airport’s razor-wire fence, wrapped in U.S. Army jackets in the bowels of lumbering C-17s. The Pentagon sent journalists photos of soldiers tenderly cradling swaddled babies. The war, we were shown, was humanitarian after all. Perhaps 200,000 did not die in vain. Were it not for U.S. ground forces, those parents would have had nobody to pass their children to.
Only 16% of Americans believed that adult Afghan evacuees were sufficiently vetted. A majority feared that some would go on to commit acts of terror in the heartland. Tucker Carlson reminded his viewers that, in any case, flying in masses of “completely different” people is a recipe for demographic and societal catastrophe. “It doesn’t work. There may be a good way to do that,” he said, but “nobody has yet figured it out.” Alarmed by the number of “fighting age men” and large families onboard the military flights, fellow Fox host Laura Ingraham warned that Democrats were letting a “mass of humanity” flood in to “fundamentally transform America.”
The airborne huddled masses did contain one group who provoked a quite distinct response. The Kabul airlift was less than halfway complete when Today published an article about “How to adopt Afghan refugee children.” Regrettably, for the readers interested, international law means that there is “no easy path.” It wasn’t just bleeding hearts who were disappointed. Morgan Ortagaus spent years as a Republican foreign policy insider before she was hand-picked by Mike Pompeo to serve as State Department spokeswoman. Now running for Congress with Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement,” she reported during the evacuation that she’d received “many requests” to adopt Afghan children. “Unfortunately,” she reported, “that looks highly unlikely right now.”
It seems crude to interrogate something as ostensibly altruistic as international adoption, particularly for those who, like your author, have reaped some of the benefits that the system provides. Once something is labeled “humanitarian,” its opponents can only be the partisans of inhumanity, an unenviable and untenable position. The moral imperative of the humanitarian act is so great that it comes to seem self-evident. Even the mass relocation and renaturalization of hundreds of thousands of children from peripheral nations to the United States over the greater part of a century becomes commonsensical because, as the residents of Kandahar know, humanitarianism justifies anything. No human price is too high to pay to kill inhumanity, which is why the revelation of Auschwitz retroactively evaporated any debt incurred by Nagasaki’s mushroom cloud.
As a humanitarian act, the occupation of Afghanistan had long centered the well-being of babies and children in an abstract, far-off sort of way. Specific children might have a whole host of different life outcomes under Deobandi theocracy or, alternatively, after U.S. white phosphorus munitions cauterize their flesh. The general category “children” does not suffer such complications. In November 2001, then-First Lady Laura Bush told the nation that not only do “our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because, in Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us,” a world where “even small displays of joy are outlawed.” A War on Terror. A War for Women, and Children, and Joy.
Three days earlier, Laura Bush’s husband had proudly announced that “children across America have organized lemonade and cookie sales for children in Afghanistan.” The bake sale proceeds were dispersed to a sprawling NGO complex: “such a force multiplier for us,” in the words of Secretary of State Colin Powell, “such an important part of the combat team.” Armed with USAID grants and middle America’s lemonade stand revenues, NGOs would be tasked with the positive role of building civil society in the vacuum that would ensue after the Taliban were erased. Together, they would ensure that those Afghan children redeemed by America’s youthful drink and cookie vendors would grow up into the citizens of a liberated Afghanistan, a nation democratic, capitalist, grateful, and free.
By the time of the Kabul airlift, the children the Bushes spoke of were in their twenties, and that nation-building dream was dead. A new generation of infants would be recruited to serve as props in one of the occupation’s last rhetorical flourishes, captured crying in the arms of U.S. troops in front of U.S. military cameras--a small victory wrenched from the jaws of defeat.
Such images could even have melted the heart of the likes of Fox’s Laura Ingraham. For years, she warned of the “massive demographic changes” wrought in the U.S. by legal as well as illegal entry. Ingraham isn’t a conservative of the old establishment, one of the antiquated kind professing themselves to be opponents not of immigration but illegality. She doesn’t style herself the supporter of legal immigrants, facilitating their assimilation by limiting their numbers, feigning indignation at line-cutting on their behalf. Ingraham is different. She doesn’t object only to unassimilated immigrants who ungratefully scorn the customs and ideals of their new home. Her critique is not procedural or cultural but racial: not ethos but ethnos. She does not defend the nation's laws and norms so much as its blood.
Yet Ingraham does vociferously defend one type of admittance to the U.S.: At the 2013 Step Forward for Orphans march in Washington, D.C., she implored the Obama administration to expedite international adoptions. Ingraham spoke as the mother of three international adoptees herself, one of them from Guatemala.
It may simply be that Ingraham is a hypocrite. Certainly, if more U.S. families followed her lead, the arrival of millions of Guatemalan-American adoptees would constitute a sweeping demographic shift for the nation. But there is likely something more profound at play. Ingraham thinks of her adopted daughter’s ethnicity as entirely distinct from the equally Guatemalan migrants she fears will overrun the southern border.
From the outset, international adoption has involved a strange racial transubstantiation. The international adoption system was born in Korea after the conclusion of open hostilities in the first modern U.S. war against an exclusively Asian enemy. Koreans may have been the first people to die while being called “gooks” by U.S. troops. Journalists found that GIs, who “never spoke of the enemy as human as though they were people, but as one might speak of apes,” were “ready to fire at any Korean.”
A 1951 Navy documentary features heroic footage of the U.S. military napalming Korean villages and picking off survivors. “Kill after kill,” drones the narrator. “Whoever runs gets shot down with small arms fire.” At times, the words have a culinary tinge: “fry them out, burn them out, cook them.” But first, we’re shown that our troops’ chief concern was the wellbeing of Korean orphans. “Sometimes, I think that’s the last thing any of us will ever forget. Those kids. Laughing, crying, homeless, hungry. Until we fed them.”
Many were the mixed-race offspring of the sexual economy of occupation and war. Not fully Korean, but in no way white. If they were older at the war’s close, their marriage to a white person would have been illegal in the majority of U.S. states. Despite this, and though they may have “once called all Koreans ‘gooks,’” reported the Christian Science Monitor, American soldiers threw themselves into caring for these war orphans. U.S. audiences responded so strongly to images of the “waifs of war” that they began adopting them into their own homes. Some of these saviors of Korean children doubtless became acquainted with their plight while cheering as the the military fried, burned, and cooked Korean adults. That those first adoptees were rescued from growing up into the kind of people against whom such acts are appropriate may, from this perspective, have been as large a kindness as bestowing family, shelter, and food. If some are born destined for savagery by a curse of history or blood, their civilization and redemption would be a more profound conversion than their transformation into smoldering flesh at Sinchon or corpses consumed by the Sonoran Desert. A foreign child, unencumbered by the corrupting social ties of her nominal home, can yet transcend her destiny.
The international adoptee undergoes a profound metaphysical change, though it leaves no outward sign. Adoption can’t change a child’s skin tone or eye shape. Adoption can’t change how much of a gook she’ll be to the man on the street. But the Korean during the war was an approximation of meat, a thing to be fried and cooked, while the wartime Afghan was the approximation of Terror made flesh. Through adoption, the empire ponders: What if their children could, instead, become an approximation of us?
Adoption is of course the territory of self-conscious liberals, slouching towards post-racial America while wringing their hands about how to best support their children of color. These are the kind of people who write New York Times Magazine articles guiltily confessing to their readers that as they retrieved their daughter from Guatemala, they overheard a man muttering, “There goes another baby taken from their country.” (This particular author goes on to proclaim that she’s already steeling herself to have hard conversations about race with her daughter once she’s older, though by that time, her daughter will presumably be able to find the article online herself.)
Less self-reflective liberal adoptive parents believe their families show that the post-racial utopia is already here, that love has truly conquered all. But the demographic alchemy of international adoption also permits its defense by racialist nativists like Ingraham. Conservatives defend international adoption from “wokeness,” from the “evil” of “modern progressive” critiques. Wars in foreign countries are justified because their inhabitants deserve to be destroyed and because their inhabitants deserve to be saved. American power is justified by its vibrant civil society, a sphere which not only permits but positively encourages ruminations on the injustice of our falling bombs.
The adopted child has been welcomed by those who “build bridges” and those who “build walls,” welcomed by those who hold that admitting to the U.S. all those who wished to pass would be a domestic political catastrophe, an unacceptable pollution of the body of the state and the blood of the people.
For children cannot unmake us. It is we who can unmake them.
Children aren’t adopted from just anywhere to anywhere. The unwanted babies of the Hollywood Hills never end up in Tegucigalpa. No quantity of deserving infertile Honduran couples could cause such a thing to transpire. Like wealth and immigrants, adoptees only fall into the core of the empire, a motion that its residents take as evidence of the fundamental goodness and impartiality of American society and governance. “It is one of the noblest things about America,” Michael Gerson’s Washington Post column declared, “that we care for children of other lands who have been cast aside.” Immigrants might be admitted to the country, but the adoptee gets the inclusion that only English labeled unaccented and hearts free of homesickness can provide. Adoptees don’t just get social security numbers; we get surnames and relatives, too. The U.S. can’t remake the world in its image, but it can remake a portion of the world’s excess kids.
Now, all young children might be considered potential blank slates insofar as they’ve not yet congealed into specific types of people. What prevents infants from actually being little screaming tabulae rasae are the various social assemblages already forming them into the people they will one day become: the family that raises them, the neighbors that know them, the state that records their name in its records. The process of adoption is both the plane that takes the adoptee and the knife that carves her out of these relationships so she might be sutured to others. That knife annihilates the legal personhood attached to a bundle of meat and nerves; that flesh is joined to a new identity birthed from Department of Homeland Security documentation.
Each adoptee has been born twice and died once. The space between lives exerts pressures distinct from the laws prevailing on either side.
In an analogous excision, useful, valuable things must be cut away from their context to be exchanged as commodities. A Toyota Hilux can get you to work, haul materials to a contracting job, or serve as a weapons platform for a DShK 1938/46 Soviet heavy machine gun. But what makes the Hilux a commodity is the fact that you can sell yours and use the proceeds to buy anything you please. In transaction, the specificities of production and use are painted over by the fact of price within the context of the market.
Though individuals in market economies are naturally subject to market pressures, what prevents you from being exchanged for the 1988 Motor Trend Truck of the Year is a set of political rights bestowed by the state in whose dominion you reside. These rights are wrapped around a legal identity attached to you by that same state, an identity which generally follows you, for better or for worse, for the entirety of your time on this mortal coil. The thing about international adoption is it is predicated on the obliteration and replacement of this formal personhood. Thereafter, as a CDC report cited in Samuel Alito’s Roe v. Wade draft opinion declares, “adoption is governed by forces of supply and demand.”
When we think of the the paradigmatic adoptee, we imagine someone removed from their society proper long before adoption, suspended in the liminal space of the orphanage. Nameless and alone, she awaits the identity she will one day be given. U.S. law demands orphanhood: only the “eligible orphan” qualifies for legal adoption.
Such a requirement might lead you to think that all adoptees start as children with no families to support them, abandoned by parental neglect or death––but this is not actually the case. Some children are stolen; some given up for purely economic reasons. Others just disappear from facilities that their parents placed them in temporarily. The demand for Guatemalan babies was so great that some were born for the purpose of sale onto the adoption market. A nonprofit was caught trying to traffic 103 children from a Chadian refugee camp to France. Their adoptive parents had already paid a cash advance for the children, who unfortunately weren’t orphans at all. Orphans are constructed by poverty, by trade deals and treaties, by anti-natalist policies, by social welfare cuts. Sometimes our parents die, too.
But the myth of the universally orphaned adoptee lives on because it contends that our social relations were already null. That there was nothing from which we were removed, only a place to which we had not yet been joined. Being divorced from a specific identity, adoptees are essentially equivalent to each other. Within the sea of Korean or Colombian or Black or white American potential adoptees, there’s actually no rational way to differentiate one child from any other. When the state in whose borders you reside decides your personhood is no longer worth enforcing, there is precious little to save you from the abyss of fungibility and exchange.
If the adoptee-commodity comparison seems a bit overwrought, consider the fact that some of us begin our journey by being stolen and sold into the international adoption system. Generally, when people are taken for profit, it is not theft at all but rather kidnapping. Kidnapping only works because of the social ties of the kidnapee. If you do not pay the ransom, it is not a random person but your husband, daughter, or ambassador who’s toast. It is only because of the care of others for a specific individual that kidnapping makes any sense at all. The reason why adoptee baby thefts are not baby kidnappings is that adoptees are worth more as an interchangeable unit on the adoption market than whatever our birth parents could pay. We were more valuable as possibilities than as people. The actual citizens of some countries are worth less than the potential citizens of others. That a child might be converted from one into the other is thought to be such a charitable act that it justifies the inequality that makes the whole thing possible.
International adoption provided a whole set of benefits to a range of global actors. It fed the domestic U.S. demand for adoptable children, which has traditionally outpaced supply. It allowed developing nations to slough off surplus population, and it allowed the U.S. government to assert its comparative benevolence, whether taking in the human byproducts of its Korean misadventure or rescuing the unwanted daughters of the one-child policy. These transfers made up a substantial part of a huge nonprofit adoption and child welfare sector, in the U.S. a $19 billion market.
As it stands, international adoption is, in fact, largely dead. The Netherlands brought in 40,000 international adoptees from 1957 until last year, when international adoptions were suspended after a government committee found widespread abuses including fraud, smuggling, and child theft. But Dutch adoption had already dropped precipitously, just as adoptions plummeted worldwide. In 2004, 1,300 children arrived to new families in the Netherlands. In 2019, there were only 145. In the U.S., international adoptions peaked in 2004 with 22,986 arrivals. 2019 saw just under 3,000. The following year, there were only around half as many.
International adoption was a peculiarity of the Pax Americana, a patchwork apparatus of imperial power, developmentalist schemes, and civil society bloat. Today, the market has dried up. Russia and Guatemala have both prohibited adoptions to the U.S., while China, South Korea, and Ethiopia have passed legislation to dramatically limit out-country adoptions. The Hague Convention on Inter-Country Adoptions mandates restrictions to prevent child trafficking and abduction. The U.S. government scrutinized international adoptions more closely at the same time as the purchasing power and child protections of provider countries grew. Nations with more resources generally find the export of children an embarrassment and curtail the practice. A level of uneven development combined with the congruent interests of disparate bureaucracies around the globe is necessary for a healthy child market. By and large, favorable conditions no longer prevail.
Prospective adoptive parents and NGOs now militate against the unwillingness of the federal government to keep the baby trade routes open. The National Council for Adoption decried the U.S. State Department regulating instead of advocating for international adoption. The conservative culture warriors at The Federalist warned of its impending “extinction.” The American Enterprise Institute hosted Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans at an event entitled “Saving International Adoption,” dedicated to “deconstructing popular myths and objections” to the practice. Medefind, who said concerns about child trafficking are simply “not rooted in fact,” previously directed the Bush administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The office’s mandate was to liaise with the religious charities that President Bush hailed in one speech as “the leaders, the generals, the soldiers in the armies of compassion.” He then reminded his audience of the ongoing “war” against terrorism and “outlaw regimes which hate our country and arm to threaten civilization itself.”
The failure of the Afghanistan occupation and the collapse of the adoption complex are not as distinct as they might appear. The U.S. made itself out to be the standard bearer of the “rules-based international order,” the sphere of democratic capitalism that opened development to all regardless of culture or creed so long as the capital and commodities flowed. Developing countries could blossom into the U.S. just as their abandoned children could join American homes. But that narrative expired on the Kabul runway. The images of pitiful children beamed into American homes provoked an outdated adoptive reflex inside the country that crafted ethical consumption into a political art.
As of this writing, U.S. coverage of the invasion of Ukraine has been largely adoption-free. The few stories about adoption largely concern interruptions to adoption proceedings initiated before the war, not the plight of war orphans. A far-right former state representative and militia enthusiast evidently tried to spirit a few dozen Ukrainian children to U.S. families, but news coverage was hardly favorable. The National Council on Adoption condemned the practice, in this case pointing out that certifying their true orphanhood would be impossible during a war. Perhaps the idea of orphan-as-blank-slate is more appealing when their country of origin is thought defective in some regard: too poor, too savage, too authoritarian, not a European, Christian nation whose only flaw is that it is simply too close to Russia.
International adoption is dead, but desire is not. In January, a woman shopping in a Walmart offered another shopper $250,000 to purchase her baby, enthralled by his blue eyes and blond hair. Not taking no for an answer, she doubled her offer, screaming in the parking lot that “she wanted him and she was going to take him.”
Supply chain bottlenecks make people do crazy things.