This article discusses the legal residency advocacy campaign that occurred in the late 2000s in the Netherlands and the United States on behalf of immigrant youths with precarious legal status. These advocates argued that youths possessed certain cultural attributes and that these attributes made them deserving of permanent residency status. These two campaigns drew upon different action repertoires to assert claims. Yet they both centered on immigrant youth, and they both stressed that the possession of specific cultural attributes made this subgroup uniquely deserving of exceptional consideration by the public and government authorities.
This article highlights and explains the similarities in discursive strategies across different national contexts.