Speaking like a citizen: Biopolitics and public opinion in recognizing non-citizen children in Israel

• A media campaign was crucial to labor migrant children receiving Israeli citizenship.
• The media campaign was shaped by the voicing relation between children and advocates.
• A legal petition innovated the semiotic technology for rationalizing public opinion.
• Such analysis of public opinion complements other studies of deportability.

This paper examines the public sphere process by which non-citizen children of labor migrants came to be recognized as Israeli citizens. In response to a public campaign, three government resolutions were issued in the 2000s to provide Israeli citizenship for these young non-citizens. Generally, studies of non-citizen migrants have emphasized their deportability and illegality as the primary aspect of the biopolitics of contemporary citizenship. On the other hand, I draw attention to the mass mediated process from which public opinion emerges to set the boundary between citizen and non-citizen. To describe this, I examine the pragmatics of voicing non-citizen children in public discourse. I also describe how legal documentation became the semiotic technology through which public opinion was rationalized bureaucratically.