Deportation In Family

In “Our fear of Immigrants” by Jeremy Adam smith, the author recalls a story about a young elementary student that got deported during Christmas break. Immigration has always been a controversial topic in this country. Many have different views on why deportation is beneficial and why it is not. In this instance Rodrigo Guzman’s classmates were saddened and confused about why their classmate and dear friend had gotten sent to another country for no apparent reason. It was something these students didn’t understand since it was a subject they knew nothing about, however, the students knew it was not fair to their friend. Smith wanted to dig deeper on what emotions immigrants bring up in people and why was it

Case Study #4 – Working with an Immigration Family Case #4 introduces us to Esmerelda; a 15 year-old teenager, born in the United States (U.S.) to El Salvadorian parents who fled to the U.S. in the 1990s. The intent was to secure a “better life” (Lee & Gonzalez, 2015, p. 164) that would counter the detrimental living conditions and the possibility of starvation they were facing in their native country. Unfortunately, Esmerelda’s family is poor, resides a “rural southern town” as a family of six. Her parents work extremely long shifts at a “poultry plant” to keep a roof over the family’s heads, food on the table and provide as much of their needs as possible. Due to the lengthy work hours, Esmerelda is forced to stand in as the ‘acting parent’ with effort to look after her siblings in her parent’s absence.

Studies show, within 3 months, 80,000 illegals were deported from just Texas and many more in five other states; 700,000 returned to Mexico voluntarily, 488,000 in two other states (Nagle). A child born in the country from foreign parents are citizens at birth and it should not be taken away from them. “Former representative Nathan Deal of Georgia had a better idea, and he introduced a bill proposing that being born in the U.S. only confers citizenship if one child’s parents is a U.S. citizen” (Nagle). When parents are deported their children don’t have a choice whether they go with their parent or stay, the government chooses it for them. Some parents don’t know they can request return upon deportation or their children could be replaced with their relatives or take them with them to their home (Valbrun). A mother sent a request to visit her child but got no response and her child was taken care by strangers and the mother did not accept this idea. Obama stated that they are focusing on deporting immigrants that have committed crimes. “It’s clearly un-American to take kids away from loving families” (Valbrun). Social workers say children are better off living with middle class Americans than their own “poor” parents who want to try to make a living in a new place. An immigrant parent’s worst fear is to be deported and abandon their child

In the United States, many families are currently being affected by the Dream Act’s failure to pass. The Dream Act would have given many undocumented children the ability to have a pathway to citizenship. The Dream Act believed in the importance of social support within the family by supporting family unification. However, due to its failure to pass, millions of undocumented children are now at risk of being deported and having their families divided. Although the U.S. government created a new policy known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), it is not providing immigrants with the same opportunity. DACA instead give undocumented people the opportunity to not be deported for a maximum of three years, but will never become a pathway to permanent citizenship. The Dream Act and DACA ultimately affects the physiological, emotional, and mental health of the immigrants who reside within the U.S.

Fathers across the U.S are being taken away from their own homes forcibly. Small children are witnessing their own fathers be taken away helplessly, crying and screaming. Mothers and children left with no financial support and no father figure to have. Children start becoming a problem in school faced with anger and depression from their father being taken away. Hanging with the wrong crowd in order to not feel depressed could then lead to the use of drugs and drinking at an early age all because their father or mother was taken away. The families that suffer from this deportation aren’t guaranteed any financial help at all. Mothers are then left abandoned by their own government with their three or four children. The government overlooks the

Most of these individuals have families and their deportation have an impact on the family since they are often the bread winners.

Especially the children of the person being deported. Migrants that are greatly affected by this are mainly from Mexico and central America. Once a family member is deported the family faces the question of what they will do. Will they move their whole family, even their U. S born children from the culture and society they have grown up in the country of their origin? Or will the family split up creating a single parent home or leave their child with another caregiver? Or lastly will they live in risk as an undocumented migrant? Undocumented migrant workers are much more likely to face economic struggles, lack of social usage of programs, and social remoteness. Although these directly affect the adult migrant the children suffer from these effects as well. They do get a proper education or amount of healthy foods, which untimely lead to many obstacles and setbacks for the child. There have been studies to prove that children of undocumented parents are more likely to be developmentally delayed. There is a long chain of effects on the children of undocumented parents. In the article it states “Yoshikawa (2011) found that when a parent is undocumented, he/she experiences greater social exclusion, which results in greater economic hardship and job-related stress, lower social support, parental psychological distress, and decreased use of center-based care, which in turn affects children's cognitive development at 24 months of age. Children of undocumented parents are also less likely to have health insurance (Lurie, 2008) and be rated in good health by their parents” (Kalil & Ziol-Guest, 2009). Also, when a child is separated from a parent or parents, they deal with the feeling of trauma, abonnement, isolation, depression, and fear. Not only do the children deal with these emotions, but their entire family also faces many economic problems since once one of the parents leave,

A common misconception is that legalizing illegal immigrants would just result in “criminals” running around the streets causing disturbances. Who is ignored is the benefit of a very specific population of Americans, the sons and daughters of illegal immigrants. American children are harmed every time one or both of their parents is deported as a result of the lack of an immigration reform. In the article, “Children of Illegal Immigrants Struggle When Parents Are Deported” Valbrun states that “the government deported more than 46,000 parents of children with U.S. citizenship in the first half of 2011, according to the ARC report.” In these conditions, jailed parents cannot fight for their children’s custody and at times lose it to the government who then puts the children out for adoption or in foster care when they already have loving parents. Properly legalizing immigrants would improve the lives of many American children and improve the American social aspects with more

While the INS – Immigration and Naturalization Services in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security have a duty to perfom, the system has many flaws. The essay, “Impounded Fathers”, by Edwidge Danticat, brings to light some of the unfair circumstances caused by these organizations. It speaks about the immigration system in the United States of America and the adverse effects that it has had on millions of lives. Edwidge shared her personal experience with the system, as well as the experiences of other immgrants who were and are still being impactedby by these organizations. She spoke about the injustices dealt to persons of foreign origin and their American born children. These children who

none of subgroups of children fell within category of probable depression when the clinical cut off T-scores (>60) were applied (Kovacs 2003), but children who went back to Mexico when the parent was deported ranked highest in the depression symptoms category, these children were more likely to have emotional problems and negative physical symptoms than children whose undocumented parents were not at risk of being deported or detained. The result also showed that all three groups did fall within the category of probable anxiety disorders. Children whose undocumented parents were not at risk of deportation were more likely to report positive self-concept than children who went back with the parents after being deported. When a parent is detained or deported, the mental health and well-being of the US born child is affected immensely.

Zayas, L. H., Aguilar-Gaxiola, S., Yoon, H., & Rey, G. N. (2015). The distress of citizen-children with detained and deported parents. Journal Of Child And Family Studies, 24(11), 3213-3223.

Out of those million immigrants there are about one out of five children under the age of eighteen are either an immigrant or a child of immigrants parents. (Orozco, 2001). The majority of immigrants are from Latino or Asian origin. The United States has been experiencing a large wave of people coming into this country to start a new life from what they had before. Every region in the country is experiencing the growth of immigration every year. With this new immigration the U.S is witnessing immigrant children take over public schools. Today immigrant students are becoming the fastest population to grow in the child population in the United States (Hamilton, 2010). Many parents send their children to the United States and separate themselves from them because they want them to have a better life and live the American dream. Many kids go to school at a young age and get through high school and college and even start their careers. But many of them have to live in fear of being found out. They can’t trust many people, even the closest one to them (Vargas,

Families are meant to be together, have fun and share the most important moments. Many families are being forced to be separated from each other and go through situations that no one would want to be in. Immigrant deportation breaks up families, denies certain individuals their rights and creates a great tension between races. Any more reason why all this must be stopped?

Over the last quarter of a decade, illegal immigration and enforcement have dominated mainstream policy making (Meisnner, Kerwin, Chishti & Bergeron, 2013). There has been a lot of public debate too, on whether or not the successive governments of the US have been able to effectively address illegal immigration and its enforcement thereof. However, as Meisnner et al. (2013) state, in the wake of the terror attacks of 2001, a paradigm shift appears to have been established, with the enforcement of illegal immigration taking a de facto stance. As such, as Dreby (2012) intimates, the number of immigrants who have been deported or removed from the US since 2001 has risen from 190, 000 to close to 400, 000. Considering the fact that there are more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in America, deportation on such a large scale without a doubt will result in a continuous chain reaction. One such consequence, as The New York University School of Law (2012) states, is that families are inherently broken apart by the removal of a family member. Additionally, there are other psychological and psychosocial impacts on families that are far-reaching. Because of these and many other compelling factors, this paper argues that the US should work to prevent deportations, rather than enforce them.

In the book Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, Jacqueline Bhabha writes about the implications deporting immigrants has on the idea of nuclear families. She references conclusions made by Jean Piaget, a famous developmental psychologist, about the negative impact children feel caused by separation from their parent or parents. Piaget states that the presence of parents is “essential for a child’s development of morality” (Bhabha 20). Research about the impact of separation with regards to immigrant children who are eventually reunited with their parents, reports the complex emotional turmoil experienced by the child or children. Therefore, thrusting a child into the migration process only proves to be more harmful than helpful. Clinical reports reveal considerable negative impacts on children and on family relationships both during and after the “separation phase”. Parents forced to part with their “children may feel guilt, but expect gratitude for the sacrifices that they made for their child, but in reality, the child ends up feeling more anger, and resentment towards the parent for leaving them” (Bhabha