This article analyzes and compares two instances of national border crossing that involve decisions about children from China: children whose Canadian relatives have applied to adopt them, and unaccompanied children who seek refugee status. Discourse analysis of interviews, hearings, and official documents in the two cases demonstrates how the ‘innocence’ and ‘best interests’ of children are produced through three specific forms of knowledge: age, generational ordering, and most significantly, cultural readings of Chinese kinship. By examining the two cases of relative adoption and unaccompanied refugee claimants next to each other, the article reveals some of the institutional discourses through which childhood is constructed in the socio-legal discretionary power over immigration. The study also considers how the flexible deployment of conceptualizations of childhood, especially imaginaries of culturally ‘other’ kinship and childhood, serve the production of the nation-state.