When the Child (of Undocumented Migrants) Becomes the Parent (in Good Standing) ...
While the classical anthropology of kinship privileges the observation of interpersonal relations based on the positioning of adults with respect to children, this text deals with ethnographed legal situations where the meaning of filiation is reversed: either the administrative examination assigns an adult foreign person to his or her status as “child of”; or French law on foreigners considers, in certain cases, the child as the central operator of access to his or her parent’s residence and the parent then depends on the child (for example, as “parent of a schoolchild” or “parent of a French child”). Two propositions emerge from the study of these regularization mechanisms based on private and family life: on the one hand, the procedure is based on the alternative between descending filiation and ascending filiation; on the other hand, the two meanings of filiation corroborate, for foreigners, the hierarchy between the law and the infra-law. My analysis points to the double constraint: the paradoxical injunction to be, at the same time, “child of ...” and “parent of ...”.