Labor & Employment Law

Immigration Policies Hurt Children, Rip Families Apart

By James Parks

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.?

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 15, 2010 (boomark / email).