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Immigration Policies Hurt Children, Rip Families Apart
Two weeks before Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070, takes effect, immigrant children and their advocates made an urgent plea to members of Congress to review how the nation’s broken immigration system hurts children and its long-lasting effects on children and families.
At a Capitol Hill press conference and in an ad hoc congressional hearing today, two young victims of our nation’s immigration system recounted their experience of being separated from their parents as a result of Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration enforcement practices. Arpaio’s tough enforcement practices have been condemned by human rights and civil rights advocates and challenged in court.
Eleven-year-old Heidi Ruby Portugal told reporters and members of Congress that before her mother’s detention, she admired “all uniformed people that protect our country.”
It’s a pity that those thoughts are gone thanks to all those mistreatments and the arrests….They took away the most precious thing that children have, our mother. With one hit they took away my smile and my happiness.
Matteo Perea, 12, expressed his fears of losing his parents:
The laws in Arizona are just hate against us. I am always worried when my family leaves the house that something might happen to them. I think about it when my dad goes to work that he might not come back or when I go to school that there might not be someone to pick me up when I get out.
The Capitol Hill actions are part of the National Children’s Advocacy Day, which is co-sponsored by more than 25 organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and the Family Values @ Work.
“Our alliance covers a broad swath of different constituencies and interests, and every organization represented here stands firmly together in the defense of our nation’s children,” said Karen Nussbaum, assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO.
The immigration dialogue in the United States has veered dangerously off track to a single-minded focus on enforcement at all costs, and we cannot stand by and watch families get ripped apart. That’s not who we are as a nation.
Carola Suárez-Orozco, a professor of psychology at New York University, told the press conference about a report released in February by the Urban Institute, which found the vast majority of children whose parents were detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the workplace and in the home
exhibited multiple behavioral changes in the aftermath of parental detention, including anxiety, frequent crying, changes in eating and sleeping patterns, withdrawal and anger. Disturbingly, the children also experienced dramatic increases in housing instability and food insecurity, which are both dimensions of basic well-being.
Click here to read the report, “Facing Our Future: Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Enforcement.”
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12 Comments
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What about American Kids that because of what this little girls parents have done can’t feed or cloth her properly.This BS that only illegal immigrant kids get hurt in this deal is a crock.When Mom and Dad can’t find a job because an illegal is doing it for next to nothing those children suffer too.
This common but misguided notion that immigrants take American jobs has been proven false over and again. If you don’t believe it, take the United Farmworker challenge through their Take Our Jobs Campaign–where they will gladly help any American who wants an immigrant’s job in the fields to obtain that job (most Americans just aren’t willing to do that kind of difficult labor). Just visit the following link and they will help you out: http://takeourjobs.org/
The illegal aliens problem is far deeper than anyone realizes. The farmers who USED to produce our food have been forced out of their fields by the huge corporations. That is the beginning of the problem Illegal aliens who come here illegally have created the situation of being separated from their children by their own lawbreaking activity. After it happens they want to blame everyone for their problems but themselves, when in reality they KNOW they did it to themselves.
I DO NOT FEEL SORRY FOR THEM!!
If I told you that I’m coming to live at your house because it is better than mine, then take your food, your job, and then move all my relatives in with me, and take your house, just because I want to, how would that go down? That is what ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE DOING!! This is MY COUNTRY,NOT YOURS, GET OUT!!!
Only 4% are working in the fields, Wendy! 4%, the rest are stealing our jobs.
Wendy I have stood on picket lines with many of my building trades brothers from all crafts and watched illegal immigrants cross them and do my job.While my kids couldn’t do many things because at the time I couldn’t afford it.You believe what you want but I’ve been there done that.
The state of immigration policy in our nation hurts everyone except the only ones that the finger should get pointed to, first and last, the employers of the vulnerable, exploited, undocumented immigrant workers.
The AFL-CIO leadership rightfully recognizes the sadness and urgency of undocumented immigrant families slit apart by deportation but does nothing meaningful or significant to help the UFW union in stopping the daily abuse and exploitation of undocumented farm workers, to the point of death for some. Nearly every labor, job safety and immigration law on the books is flagrantly disregarded by agricultural employers with impunity. Where are the AFL-CIO and its member unions then? Is it terrible to deport undocumented mothers and fathers and split families apart but tolerable to abuse them in the farm fields to the point of killing them in the 100-degree plus heat of the fields?
Then the United Farm Workers Union leadership (who knows as well as anyone the pitifully poor pay, terrible and dangerous working conditions and the degree that Labor, Job Safety and Immigration Laws are disregarded in farming today) has the stupidity to alienate American union workers by taunting them with rhetoric like: “Come take our jobs” or “undocumented immigrants are doing work American union workers refuse to do.” I added ‘union’ there because we are American workers too.
Hello, no one with a second choice would be working in the farm fields of America today with the disrespect, abuse, working conditions and pay they get from employers, not even undocumented migrant workers! American workers were starved out of agriculture decades ago when I worked the fields during the summer as a child and young adult.
Instead of telling American workers, they agree with their decision to work in trades that give their families respect and a better living and then asking their help to make things better for farm workers, union leadership make flip demeaning remarks about American workers and Immigration Law enforcement while agricultural employers continue to abuse and exploit their workers unabated. The Far Right could not do a better job of seeing the status quo is maintained.
Non-enforcement of immigration law is not helping anyone but employers because labor law and job safety law are not enforced for undocumented immigrant labor either. Union leadership should point the finger at employers on this issue and Keep It There.
What about the millions of legal immigrant families kept apart and children hurt by decade long waits overseas for their green cards, waits created by US government non enforcement of immigration laws and illegal alien amnesties?? See more details at Immigrant Rights Foundation . org.
And the AFL-CIO wants even more of these wait inducing, immigrant family splitting, child hurting amnesties!!!! It’s more of the same illegal alien first, law abiding immigrant last agenda that has broken the US immigration system.
Plus amnesty is racist, it benefits 100 Mexicans and Central Americans for every Asian, African, South American, and European who benefits.
This means because the AFL-CIO leadership is pushing amnesty, they are anti-immigrant racists and bigots.
This is the battle that has gone on since the Anglo worker came from the north and the Mexican worker came from the south to work in the mines of the southwest. The Anglo made two dollars a day and the Mexican was willing to work for one-half that. He became angry because the Gringo got twice as much and the Anglo was angry because the Mexican was taking his job for one half. Then, somewhere along the line, or several different times, the U.S.A. decided to enforce immigration laws and the Mexican government became involved (as it has once again) in demanding that their citizens be treated with dignity and respect. It had nothing to do with dignity and respect, but with the ability to move numerous members of an uneducated class of people to another country where numbers of them had families in both countries that they were supporting. To send these people back to Mexico would have completely devastated the Mexican economy, both from the stand point of the remunirations being sent to Mexico and the return of a population that had seen how the “rest” of the world lives and who now were unwilling to live like peons. Look up peonage and see when it was declard illegal in the U.S.A., it might just surprise you!
You know that it is not just farming jobs that imigrants take right !!
It is also roofing jobs,general laboring ,cooking,lanscaping,cement work, driving jobs, the list goes on and on and farming is in there the farming jobs take away the ability for kids that have been able to work on farms no longer can. Now i am not blaming it all on the imigrants because it is also the greedy employers that take advantage of the imigrants that are here however if we didnt have the overwelming number of imigrants that are willing to work for pennies then we would have such a problem.
It is high time for the labor movement to get back into the business of protecting its members instead of protecting crooked agribusiness and some elements of the Democratic Party.
I am appalled at the stupid remarks about the government tearing families apart. It is the FAMILIES themselves that do that. THEY are the ones who decide to keep the children apart from their parents when they are deported. The goverment does NOT force the children to stay if they are US citizens. They are perfectly free to come and go. How about the woman who took refuge in the church in Chicago? She plead guilty to TWO FELONIES and was deported. That did NOT tear her family apart because she took her son back to Mexico with her. Think that criminals should get a free pass on their crimes because they are parents? I wish the AFL-CIO would cry about the criminals families who are REALLY torn apart by being sent to prison and away from their families. Why are illegals a superior class of people when they are not only crooks, but not even US citizens?
We should no more take into consideration whether the illegal aliens that we deport have children than we should take into consideration whether the convicted criminals whom we incarcerate have children. We are dealing with the illegality of the situation, not their family situation.
FWIW anyone who enters a country illegally with a child or who produces a child while in that country illegally is behaving as a completely irresponsible parent, just as a car thief or burglar who would take his small child along on his criminal activities. The separation of families is the fault of the illegal aliens themselves, not the country that is enforcing its laws.
I also find it interesting that the illegal aliens who are participating in the “Take Our Jobs” project aren’t in construction, manufacturing, or service industries. Relatively few US workers could afford to take a job that is seasonal such as farm work because they need a salary 12 months a year.
Missing from this publicity stunt are 2 important facts: First, most jobs with a high concentration of illegal aliens suffer severe wage depression, making it less likely that a person could financially accept such a job. Meatpacking wages are about half of what they were in the 80′s when that was a sought-after job. Second, the big industrial farms could get an UNLIMITED supply of H-2A LEGAL workers and don’t have to resort to hiring illegal aliens. They simply don’t want to adhere to the laws regarding length of employment, health and safety, housing, and travel that H-2A entails. They would prefer to privatize the profits of cheap illegal labor while socializing the expenses by passing them on to the communities and tax-payers.
See below for a good story about what happened to legal workers when Swift was raided in 2006.
http://www.cis.org/2006SwiftRaids
Send them all BACK.
I have been out of work for 19 months. The government has contracted a ‘vocational rehabilitation counselor’ to send me out on job leads. Every one of these jobs is offering 7.25 – 10 or ll dollars an hour, hoping to hire some kid desperate for a job, who maybe lives with parents, or does not have a family. A family man like me can not compete or work because apparently so many young people – citizens of various backgrounds – are willing to work for so little money. By your logic, my experience should induce me to call for the deportation of all Americans, citizens and non-citizens, below the age of 35. Then maybe I could get a job, right? Or would such a civil-war-inducing policy further ruin unimaginably our economy, leaving no jobs for anyone?
It is true that many of the young people searching in this area would be here without permission, if it were not for Washington’s endless and failed cold war against one particular Spanish-speaking island. As such, the Cubans are “special”, because they are political cannon-fodder in this phony propaganda war.
Can we face up to the fact that all of the laws, with very few notable exceptions, are written to satisfy the wealthy, who get all of their stolen wealth from the sweat of workers? – That these laws are enforced, or not, according to the whims of the superrich masters of the US and the world? Are you asking the AFL-CIO to take over the implimentation of America’s laws, which are designed to create, not a level playing field, but a field so tilted that all of the money flows to the very few who are already superrich, and hire the lawyers that write all of their precious laws?
Clearly, the AFL-CIO is one of the organizations that can and do help organize us to fight for passage of certain important laws which help workers – like extending unemployment. We can fight for better implementation and enforcement of certain pro-worker laws, too, like environmental laws, minimum wage laws, occupational safety laws, etc.
The current system of immigration laws is the worst for workers. It promotes anti-hispanic and anti-immigrant hysteria among our class. It presents union organizers with an impossible situation, because immigrant workers, as soon as they press demands, are threatened with deportation. We need a comprehensive change in immigration law, so that, yes, legal immigration will occur more often, and illegal less often. And we need humane laws which do not punish children and families.
We have a shortage of unions in the US, and a shortage of courageous leaders who will tell us the truth – that workers will never move further ahead in this country until we abandon the Democrats and establish our own political party. ( It is so elementary, that I almost feel silly as I continue to promote the idea! )
The most severe shortage that we suffer from today, however, is a shortage of empathy – the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes. That shortage is why workers cross picket lines, or suck up to the boss for overtime while others are sent home early. For all of the writings of the immigrant-haters on this site, that is all that shines through – they can not empathize with or relate to anyone else’s probllems, unless they are monoligual caucasians born in the US who time has passed by. This is the opposite of what unions were meant to be. ‘Protect our white jobs’ will not be the battle cry of the coming upsurge.