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.