Discourses of Exclusion: Immigrant-Origin Youth Responses to Immigration Debates in an Election Year Dafney Blanca Dabach a , Aliza Fones a , Natasha Hakimali Merchant b , and Mee Joo Kim a a University of Washington; b University of North Georgia ABSTRACT Political discourse on immigration policy often provides a window into a society’s boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Here, we seek to understand how those in liminal positions respond to political debates that raise issues of boundary maintenance. Drawing from Bakhtinian concepts of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as well as Gramsci’s concept of common sense, we analyzed how a superdiverse sample of 26 immigrant-origin adolescents (from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe) responded to video segments of presidential debates from the 2012 U.S. election. Youth’s responses to presidential video clips about undocumented immigration policies fell along a spectrum from inclusionary to exclusionary, with many voicing mixed responses to immigration policies. Half of the youth referenced their own family’s migration experience when discussing immigration policy, most frequently in empathetic ways; however, this did not preclude them from aligning with discourses of exclusion. The theme of fairness was prevalent in their responses, yet it emerged in distinct ways. This work highlights the need to interrogate common-sense discourses of exclusion. KEY WORDS Adolescents; discourse; immigrant youth; immigration; immigration policy; politics; undocumented The presidential candidates’ faces suddenly appeared on the projector screen in the civics classroom. And, as the candidates debated about immigration policy and the fate of an estimated 11.2 million undocumented people in the United States (Brown & Stepler, 2016), 1 adolescent immigrant students watched as their teacher asked them to think critically and share about what the politicians were saying (Field notes, October 23, 2012). From a wide array of countries, youth were naturalized citizens or children of immigrants voting for the first time in elections or without voting rights as “noncitizens.” As the candidates’ words, gestures, and images beamed into the classroom, there was little to discern students’ perspectives on these political performances—performances that pitched particular ideas about what kinds of immigrants belonged within the nation and which did not. Immigrant youth’s voices were missing as they watched silently. Because voice tends to vary across contexts (Juffermans & Van der Aa, 2013), we reasoned that if we were not able to capture immigrant youth’s voices in classrooms, then changing the context to one-on-one-interview settings might provide more access to their voices. The purpose of this article is to understand how immigrant youth articulated responses to discourses of immigration repre- sented in presidential-policy debates that drew particular boundaries of inclusion and exclusion to the nation-state. In essence, immigration debates are a means for justifying systems of exclusion (Wodak, 2008, p. 55). Because of this, many scholars have analyzed public discourses about immigration policy (Chávez, 2008; Hamann & Reeves, 2012; Mehan, 1997; Santa Ana, 2002), and recent scholarship has especially focused on the role of children within immigration discourses (Orellana & Johnson, 2012; Wiley, 2013). However, still needed are the voices of immigrant youth CONTACT Dafney Blanca Dabach dbd1@uw.edu University of Washington, 115 Miller Hall, Box 353600, Seattle, WA 98195-3600. © 2016 Taylor & Francis JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY & EDUCATION http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2016.1239538