Media and Migration:

International Adoption, Globalization, and the Internet
BY J.M. Weimer

 

J. M. Weimer is an MA student in the New School Media Studies program.

 

A quick Internet search using the phrase "international adoption" produces over 313,000 pages devoted to the subject. The adoption of children from other countries 1 is a widespread phenomenon, with an estimated 30,000 children migrating between over one hundred countries a year.2 Between 1971 and 2001, U.S. citizens adopted 265,677 children from other countries, with numbers more than doubling in a decade, from 9,050 children in 1991 to 19,237 in 2001.3 Using as my point-of-departure Appadurai's idea of the interconnectedness of "media and migration,"4 I am interested in examining the ways in which the widespread shuttling of bodies across national borders is reflective of aspects of globalization and is impacted by new media.

Central to a consideration of international adoption's relationship to globalization is the acknowledgement of the socio-economic and geo-political hegemonies that underlie global infrastructures, producing the neocolonialist and imperialist dynamics that operate between these divides. The mass exportation of children for adoption abroad reflects this to such an extent that Damien Ngabonziza, Programmes Officer at the International Social Services located in Geneva, Switzerland, makes explicit that, "African countries generally view intercountry adoption as a form of neocolonialism and do not, for the most part, sanction the adoption overseas of native children."5

The prospective adoptive parents are always of the First World: predominantly from Western, industrialized countries such as the United States, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. Of those countries, they tend to be of the upper middle class, college-educated, and Caucasian.6 In contrast, the "sending" or "exporting" countries tend to be classifiable as Third World, non-Western, or less industrialized, with the top four "exporting" countries being Russia, China, South Korea, and Guatemala. The neocolonialist dynamics between countries has also contributed to a "rescue" impulse, with the impetus for importing children into the United States usually occurring in the aftermath of war, most notably with the influx of European and Japanese war orphans after World War II, and the practice continuing "after the Korean War (1950-53) and the war in Vietnam (1954-75)." Additionally, "desperate poverty and social upheaval have been critical factors in the adoption of children from Latin America, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe over the last twenty years" as well as China's one-child policies, which contributed to the abandonment of infant girls and overcrowded orphanages."7 Tobias Hubinette, a leading scholar in the burgeoning field of international and transracial adoption studies underscores the neocolonialist forces informing the practice of sending children for adoption out of South Korea, a policy which was "utilized as a goodwill strategy to develop political ties to and trade relations with important Western allies." He goes on to point out that:

 

It cannot be a coincidence that the leading countries supplying children for international adoption to the West and mostly to the U.S., almost all fall under the American sphere of influence and have been exposed to American military intervention, presence or occupation, even if civil wars, ethnic cleansing of minorities, and corrupt dictatorships also must be added to explain why these countries became involved with the practice in the first place: Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka in Asia, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Honduras, Haiti, Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala in South America, and Ethiopia and South Africa in Africa.8

Because of the exchange of sizable amounts of monies involved in the "export" of every child, international adoption participates in the same global market as other commodities. Children, in no uncertain terms, are commodified according to global supply and demand.9 Fees for adopting internationally are higher than domestic adoptions and can range, at minimum, from $3,000-5,000 for children from Haiti or Ethiopia; $6-12,000 for children from Vietnam, Korea, China or Colombia; and $9-14,000 for children from Romania, Russia, or Guatemala, with other sources citing costs of up to $30,000.10 While one could attribute the difference in prices to variations in local exchange rates and each country's different fee scale, one cannot help noticing the racialized valuing or grading of the "goods." On an international market of predominantly white buyers, black children are perhaps the least "desirable", Asian adoptees are slightly more "desirable," and children from predominantly white populations such as Eastern Europe/Russia are arguably the most sought after and therefore the most expensive.

The commodification and export of a country's children is good business - "fees from international adoptions add more than $50 million dollars a year to Guatemala’s economy, […bringing] in more money than snow peas and broccoli."11 In terms of gross national profits and in its mysterious global monetary flows, I would argue that the Appaduraian concept of "financescapes" is applicable in a discussion of international adoption. Furthermore, transnational transactions, traded on the legitimate, but highly unregulated, global markets, require a network, or what Appadurai terms as a "gray market" to “capture the quasi-legal characteristic of such settings.” Just like the “moonlighting sailors, diplomats, and airline stewardesses […who comprise the network of goods which] often end up [being] smuggled through air- and seaports and peddled in the gray markets of Bombay's streets,”12 the legal and government-sanctioned transnational shuttling of children, is also often facilitated by a network of "baby brokers" and orphanage practices of contested legitimacy.13

If international adoption participates in the financescapes characterizing our globalized economy, it also typifies the idea of the "ethnoscape" or, the "landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and individuals."14 Diasporas are a major component of the globalized society in which we live and these quiet migrations of children comprise complex deterritorialized dispersions of racially or culturally "other" people who more than likely will experience "both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return [to their country of origin.]"15 Considered in terms of a quiet but forced migration, international adoption embodies the Appaduraian idea of the interactivity between financescapes and ethnoscapes,16 and is part of a long history of forced migrations into the West:

 

Contemporary international adoption having flown in almost half a million children to the West during a period of 50 years has so many parallels to the Atlantic slave trade which shipped 11 million Africans to the New World, to indentured labor dispatching 12 million Indians and Chinese as coolies to the vast European empires, and to present day’s massive trafficking of women for international marriage and sexual exploitation.17

As is the case with sexual trafficking, international adoption is also a gendered phenomenon, as the children exported are predominantly female. One study reports that, of the more than 150,000 Koreans adopted overseas, 58% are female. Another survey reports that, internationally, in 1996, almost two girls were adopted from abroad for every boy, amounting to a gender disparity of 64% females vs 36% males. In these terms, the exporting of children for adoption abroad is part of a larger trend described as the "feminization of migration."18

In my discussion above, I illustrate in broad terms some salient ways in which international adoption exemplifies the larger phenomenon of globalization by highlighting the neocolonialist interdependence between Third World and First World, and the gendered commodification and migration of bodies. Bearing in mind Appadurai's theory, which pairs media with migration, I will briefly mention some ways in which international adoption has been impacted by new media, "a generic term for the many different forms of electronic communication that are made possible through the use of computer technology."19 For the purposes of this paper, I focus my discussion on the Internet, which, of the many forms of new media available, seems to be the primary medium for those involved with international adoption.

One of the many effects of the Internet on international adoption has been the expediting of the adoption process, which can be lengthy, especially when dealing with international "red tape," linguistic barriers, and the byzantine bureaucracy of the orphanages and governments in exporting countries. The medium of the Internet has the potential of "decreasing costs and waiting times, thereby decreasing the amount of time that children must spend in foster care [and orphanages.]"20 In an example that is not uncommon, an American woman visiting Cambodia with plans of adopting a child there, visited many orphanages in order to "take photos of [the] children, which she planned to e-mail back to a group of waiting parents she met through online groups concerned with Cambodian adoption."21

Another way in which new media has impacted contemporary international adoption is by creating a community across the diaspora. The rhizomic nature of the World Wide Web has fostered the explosion of an international network that links the local - e.g. www.koreaklubben.org (for the Korean-Danish adoptee community) - to the global, e.g. an international organization such as Global Overseas Adoptees' Link, or goal.or.kr. Similarly, the links page on the Web site, www.karensadoptionlinks.com/adoptee.html will connect you to resources as diverse as Indian adoptees in Australia, Chilean adoptees in Sweden, search engines for orphanages worldwide, DNA registries, historical links to the Vietnam Babylift, scholarly research, and legal information. The point I emphasize here is that, while the range of information available via this Web site is extraordinary, the Web site itself is not and it represents just one of hundreds of similar resources available on the Internet.

Many of the Internet resources integrate hypertext and rudimentary hypermedia, such as the online article, "How I found My Son on the Internet,"22 in which the journalist Lisa Hofmann recounts her story of becoming an adoptive parent, which she documents more extensively on her homepage.23 In both articles, Hofmann has clickable links leading the reader to other links. For example the phrase "He was just a year old" brings the reader to an article, "What Children Understand About Adoption at Different Ages," by another author on the same Web site. The words "infertility treatments" lead to an external message board on the subject. Hofmann's article and her homepage present photographs of her adopted son and the family.

The dendritic structure of the online experience allows for easy community building within and across the often-disenfranchised sub-communities of the triad (adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents). Web rings and groups, chat rooms, online forums and bulletin boards, hypertexted link pages, and email forwarding, all allow "debate, dialogue, and relationship building among various territorially divided individuals, who nevertheless are forming communities of imagination and interest that are geared to their diasporic positions and voices.”24 In this sense, many Web sites move beyond the informational and community-building realm to become sites of agency, as "adoptees use the expansive space of the Internet to retell histories within the medium of the homepage, they negotiate the ways the discourse of […] adoption and its intersections with Western imperialism are played and recorded."25

NOTES:

1 The definition of international adoption, which is also referred to as intercountry or transnational adoption, from The Evan

B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, www.adoptioninstitute.org/FactOverview.html.

2 Noonan, Emily J. "Enacting the Global: Adoptive Parent Discourse on Transnational Adoption," 2004. Master of Arts Thesis, Georgia State University. p. 7

.
3 The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, www.adoptioninstitute.org/FactOverview/international.html.

4 Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. p. 3.

5 From the Keynote address by Peter F. Dodds at The 1998 National Adoption Conference of New Zealand, http://www.peterfdodds.com/keynote.htm.

6 Studies consistently show that most adoptive parents are Caucasian and "attended or completed college. The number of parents with college degrees increased sharply from 1983 to 1993 […] Nearly two-thirds of adoptive families earned $50,000 or more." From "Adoptions in California: Current Demographic Profiles and Projections Through the End of the Century" by Barth, Brooks, and Iyer (1995). http://statistics.adoption.com/persons_seeking_to_adopt.php.

7 "International Adoption in the U.S. Prompted by War, Poverty and Social Upheaval", www.adoptioninstitute.org/FactOverview/international.html.

8 Hubinette, Tobias. "Disembedded and Free-Floating Bodies…Examining the Borderline Existence of Adopted Koreans," 2004. Department of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University, Sweden. p. 3.

9 Examples of sources highlighting the child as commodity on the international market are almost too numerous to mention. Examples would include, "Buying and Selling - Preacher Calls Adoption Fees Discriminatory" (Dean Schabner, ABCNews.com, March 12, 2002); "Guatemala Babies Sold to Highest Bidders" (Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, June 13, 2000.

10 http://www.adoptioninstitute.org/proed/forum99.html.

11 Noonan, p. 9.

12 Appadurai, p. 50.

13 This is discussed more extensively in Sarah Corbett's article on adoptions out of Cambodia: "Baby Laundering: Where Do Babies Come From?" June, 16, 2002. The New York Times Magazine.

14 Appadurai, p. 35.

15 ibid, p. 6.

16 ibid, pp. 34-35.

17 Hubinette, p. 7.

18 Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York, Metropolitan Books, 2002. Also quoted in Noonan, p. 10.

19 http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/new_media.html.

20 Dutrow, Kelli L. and Kathryn H. Wade. "Internet Adoption: How Much is That Baby in the Window?" 2001. Georgia State University College of Law. p. 13.

21 Corbett, p. 5.

22 http://www.parentsplace.com/fertility/adoptioncentral/articles/0,,252437_252920-1,00.html

23 http://pages.ivillage.com/luvmykids4ever

24 Appadurai, p. 195.

25 Hyon, Sonjia. "Constellations of Home: Korean Adoptees Making Place and Writing 'Home' in Cyberspace." Paper presented at the 7th Annual Sociology and Committee on Historical Studies Conference, New School University, New York, April 24, 2004.