Although at times a dense read, Lawyering an Uncertain Cause is invaluable in its illumination of the complex technical and personal processes that determine the legal fate of undocumented, unaccompanied Chinese youth in the US legal system. The youth in this book are from Fujian, generally from small towns, and with relatively low educational levels. Whether they are technically “trafficked” or not, or whether they themselves are complicit in their own self-trafficking is, as Michele Statz makes very clear, uncertain. But they do arrive in the United States at a critical juncture in their lives. They may be relatively seasoned, autonomous, and savvy at ages approaching eighteen, but in the United States they are still legally children. Being under eighteen, they are—again in strictly legal terms—not fully autonomous actors. When they are apprehended, they are processed under specific government regulations as unaccompanied minors and placed in special facilities, and their legal cases are conditioned by their age. That age, of course, is increasing as they await legal resolution of their cases. Whatever the timing, the result is always complexity; Statz's goal is not to resolve the complexity but to “conceptualize and make space for the complex uncertainties at the heart of lawyering youth mobility” (p. xv).
The topic of this book is an important one on practical grounds, but also one of considerable theoretical interest. Statz provides a detailed review of the framework within which she is writing, which is “cause lawyering”—that is, an emphasis by lawyers on an overall social cause rather than the details of an individual case. It is not simply pro bono work for a particular person, but action for the overall cause of legalizing unaccompanied undocumented youth so that they can live more normal lives in America. In one sense, then, the book serves as a contribution to the literature on cause lawyering with the intriguing twists of a relatively old and savvy “child” population, and of a group from a Chinese region where culture and economic practice make the distinction between trafficking in its brutal forms and trafficking in its voluntary and familial forms rather difficult.
Lawyering an Uncertain Cause provides a useful introduction to a specific segment of US law and practice through the experience of a Fujianese population with which readers of this journal will probably be familiar. In Statz's discussion, they will be able to see how people from Fujian are rendered in the United States by lawyers and judges who know little about local and regional variation in China, and by Fujianese themselves through their own sense of difference from, and exclusion by, other Chinese in the United States. There are also intriguing examples of the tension in Chinese society between work and education and the fate of Fujianese families. For some legal statuses in the United States, for example, the youth must testify that it was the parents who trafficked them, abandoning them to an uncertain fate. But the youth sometimes resist. Even if they were not part of the family decision that they migrate, they are still part of the family and hesitate to accuse their parents.
The very best part of Statz's book is the emergence of distinct individuals from among both the Fujianese youth and their lawyers. There are legal scripts of all kinds, and Statz clearly believes those scripts bely, and even steal, the reality of people's individual lives. The youth are being fit into boxes. That is the legal task, and Statz acknowledges that it may be warranted in the legal context even though she is concerned about the “unconsidered effects of narrowed migration narratives” (p. 19).
The really encouraging lesson from the book, however, is that being put in boxes, following scripts, and even concocting scripts does not reduce people's individual humanity. The youth often make their own decisions and create their own meanings for their lives. So too do the lawyers. Cause lawyers in smaller towns and cities, for example, do not have the time or resources to fit into the usual cause lawyering network, so they go ahead and cooperate on the local level—including with the police and immigration authorities who are the designated enemy in big-city cause lawyering. Statz's most extended legal case analysis involves not cause lawyers, but incredibly naïve pro bono lawyers who spend hundreds of hours on a single case. One of them ends up adopting the Fujianese youth who is their client. Statz's commitment to letting the people emerge from their categorical assignments—their boxes—makes Lawyering an Uncertain Cause an exceptionally fair introduction to cause lawyering and to the personal and legal complexities of unaccompanied Fujianese youth.
