“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”
“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”
“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”
“Once something is labeled “humanitarian,” its opponents can only be the partisans of inhumanity, an unenviable and untenable position”
“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”
“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”
“The international adoptee undergoes a profound metaphysical change, though it leaves no outward sign”
“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.”
“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”
“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”
“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.”
“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”
“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”