The Politics of Deservingness: Comparing Youth-Centered Immigrant Mobilizations in the Netherlands and the United States

In the late 2000s, campaigns arose in the Netherlands and the United States advocating for the legal residency of immigrant youths with precarious legal status. In spite of differences between the campaigns, advocates argued that youths possessed certain cultural attributes and that these attributes made them deserving of permanent residency status. These two campaigns had very different histories, were made up of very different stakeholders, and drew upon different action repertoires to assert claims. Yet they both centered on immigrant youth, and they both stressed that the possession of specific cultural attributes made this subgroup uniquely deserving of exceptional consideration by the public and government authorities. The aim of this article is to highlight and explain similarities in discursive strategies across seemingly different national contexts. We suggest that the similarities in mobilizing strategies reflect responses to increasingly similar "rules of the game" in national citizenship regimes, whereby culture has become an increasingly effective lever in pressing the claims of certain subgroups of undocumented immigrants.