Transnational Adoption in Arizona

This project will examine the regional aspects of a relatively recent phenomenon that has its roots in the post-World War II period and that has accelerated dramatically since the early 1990s. Intercountry adoption predominantly moves children from second and third-world nations to the United States, Canada, and various Western European countries. The growth of this phenomenon constitutes another significant dimension of globalization, where growing inequities among countries around the globe produce large-scale migratory movements. A numerically small phenomenon when compared to migration by adult populations, transnational adoption nevertheless exemplifies an important new twist to these flows, particularly with respect to ongoing massive changes toward greater ethnic, racial, and national diversity within immigrant receiving nations like the United States.  Compared to the large body of research on U.S. immigration, there exists relatively little work on transnational adoption in the United States, particularly in the humanities. In addition, there is virtually no scholarship on what is sometimes called “the quiet immigration” in the state of Arizona.