In my final draft, I improved on the multimodality by including images I believed would humanize the problem I was discussing. I could have done a much better job though, as mentioned in my Reflective Introduction, as there were many aspects of multimodality I was missing from this draft.

What I lacked in multimodality, I made up for in improvement. The difference between my first and second draft was astounding. I restructured entire paragraphs to improve on their sentence structure, added a paragraph offering insight into the history of immigrant employment, added another discussing the historical treatment of immigrant children in the United States, discussed another perspective on the family separation crisis, detailed its effects on the children, and nearly completely changed the conclusion to incorporate these new changes. These changes were accompanied by the addition of eight new sources.

 

Ukwa Akkum

Professor Ramirez

Writing 39C

July 26, 2018

The Effects of the Family Separation Crisis

 

            Once upon a time, the United States was known as the land of opportunity; a place that allowed anyone to live out any dream they desired so long as they put their mind to it. Whether fleeing religious persecution or seeking a new chance at life, the country welcomed people of all races and backgrounds, leading it to become known as a “melting pot” for its large mix of cultural diversity.[1]Up until the twentieth century, migration between Mexico and the United States was unrestricted due to industries always looking to hire them for cheap labor. Even when the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which placed new immigration quotas in place, agricultural lobbies fought Congress to exclude Mexicans from being included in the quotas. The booming opportunities for labor continued until the Great Depression, when demand for labor heavily decreased and there was high competition for whatever jobs remained. Out of desperation, Americans placed the blame on Mexican immigrants for their problems out of fear that the group was stealing jobs from ‘real Americans’ and bringing disease and crime along with them.[2]As a result, hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent were sent across the border to Mexico, making it the largest deportation in American history. To make matters worse, a majority of the people sent back were valid US citizens, but the scapegoat against Mexicans made them victims of deportation as well.

            Recently, the Mexican ethnicity has once again become a scapegoat for the problems of the United States. Mirroring the past, Mexican immigrants have been blamed for bringing crime and stealing jobs, except instead of subjecting them to only deportation they have added on a new ‘punishment’: family separation. The Trump administration intends for this form of prosecution is meant to act as a deterrent for future immigrants, but its effects on the family are devastating and have the potential to greatly hinder the family structure even after reunification[3]. The women of the family suffer the largest consequences from separation, lacking the proper resources to take over as the provider of the household when separated from their husbands and being more susceptible to emotional difficulties under stress when separated from children. The risks of immigrants to put their families at risk for a small chance of a better life should be a clear indicator to the US government that immigration policies are in need of heavy reform.

Figure 1An 11-foot border wall attached to the U.S.-Mexico border separating Tijuana Beach from the Border Field State Park in San Francisco

            For a country that takes pride in its vast availability of opportunities and ability to provide an improved quality of life, it is a shock to believe that they would hypocritically provide a drastic decrease in quality of life to those who are drawn by its claims. With its long history of racial discrimination, allowing the US to continue these practices excuses them of their harsh behavior while encouraging the government to turn a blind eye towards its obvious violation of immigrant rights. Their attempts at demonizing these immigrants are mostly falsified, exaggerating statistics and ignoring the main reason immigrants choose to flee their home country: fear of persecution back home and higher paying wages to support families back home. The most generalized claim of ‘stealing jobs’ is also vastly untrue, as the majority of these migrants occupy jobs ignored by the living population of the area due to undesirable working conditions. By forcefully separating families who seek to better their own and their family’s lives, the U.S. goes against almost every fundamental principle it was built upon. Ironically, if the amount of money dedicated towards finding and deporting immigrants was reallocated towards finding solutions to the drawbacks of the current border immigration policies, the government may have already found a solution to its ‘immigration problem’.

 

The history of family separation

 

            Mexico and the U.S have had a long history regarding the chase of opportunity at the cost of family separation. Mexicans, like people from several other nations, have been migrating to the US for decades in hopes of improved living conditions and a fair-paying job despite the risks involved with immigration; often imprisonment and deportation. Despite public knowledge, there was once a time the US encouraged Mexican immigration, albite temporary, during World War II although the program was silenced after its dire consequences on the families. Ana Elizabeth Rosas discusses this “silenced” program that invited Mexicans to temporarily work in the US in “Breaking the Silence: Mexican Children and Women’s Confrontation of Bracero Family Separation.” This opportunity was a collaboration between the Mexican and U.S. government known as the Bracero Program which launched on August 6, 1942 with the intent of recruiting Mexican men to fill in for the labor shortage in agriculture and railroad maintenance during World War II. With the opportunity of stable pay and a chance at citizenship these men rushed to help, leaving behind their children and transitioning their wives into single motherhood. Over the course of the program, hundreds of thousands of men were separated from their families, leaving their households without a financial source for months at a time and forcing mothers to become the new ‘head of the household’. In order to make up for the lost wages, mothers were forced to seek jobs and face “the anguish and shame of carrying the weight of marriage, parenthood and family separation alone and in silence.” (Medina, 2006). These women lost their husbands for as long as five years at a time while being burdened under caretaking duties for their children and long hours at their workplaces. The low wages also forced the hands of children to join the work force in a struggle to make up for the lost family income, a horrible fate forced on these children by the selfishness of the US and Mexican governments.

            As more employment opportunities opened up in the US, domestic work was soon added onto the list and led to the inclusion of women in families’ first waves of migration. The 1980s in particular experienced a dramatic resurgence of paid domestic work in concentrated immigrant populations like Los Angeles and New York. As the women who previously occupied this sector moved on to work in retail, clerical, and professional jobs, immigrant women accepted the invitation of new opportunity.

For some, gainful employment was the purpose for immigrating, an end in itself. For others, employment was a survival strategy or the necessary means to other ends. However, the price of economic migration was at times higher than had been anticipated. (Messias, 2008)

As Messias implies at the end of his statement, these vacant jobs were not often ideal environments for new migrants. The low stability, freelance nature, and socially isolative nature of these ‘careers’ made it difficult for these women to comfortably adjust into their new living conditions. In order to provide for their families in their home country their only choice was to work long hours while dedicating the remainder of their time to handling personal family responsibilities. Based on the Barcelona Health Interview Study, long hours and lower-class women are a poor combination, linking these conditions with poor health status and allowing them to be heightened by the uncomfortable working conditions of domestic work.[4]As if things could not get worse, the shift of their family structure to a transnational family relationship piles on increased risk of depression and substance abuse. As implied from the information above, immigrant women tend to have quite a difficult time transitioning into this demanding lifestyle.

 

Figure 2A timeline of the Renos v. Flores settlement

 

Traveling alone while carrying the dependence of one’s family is one thing but traveling with children was a much more dangerous risk to take. Prior to 1997, the U.S. did not have an established set of instructions for dealing with immigrant children and usually kept them grouped in immigration detention centers with complete strangers for anywhere up to months on end before figuring out what to do with them. It was not until a Salvadorian housekeeper finally contacted an immigration lawyer to help claim her 15-year-old daughter from immigration services, who would have deported her if she came to claim the daughter herself. When they went to visit the daughter, they found the horrible conditions these children were kept in and decided to file a lawsuit against the U.S. government. This case came to be known as Flores v. Reno, spanning 4 years and resulting in the finalization of a requirement for the swift release of children held in immigration detention centers to either parents, adult relatives, or licensed programs that would accept custody.[5]In the case that proper placement for children was not available immediately, children were required to be held in the ‘least restrictive’ area available according to their age and needs. Many modifications were made to these rules years after the settlement, as noted in the timeline above, but the two most recently important decisions occurred under the Obama administration. The first, under the Obama administration, occurred in 2015 when a California federal judge ruled that the Flores v. Reno requirements should also extend to parents and ordered for parents to be released along with their children if they were not considered a flight risk.[6]This short-lived decision was soon reversed a year later in appeals court, and a more extreme ruling followed 3 years later known as the ‘zero tolerance policy’ under the Trump administration, ordering for all ‘illegal’ border crossers, including those legally coming to file for asylum, to forcibly turn over custody of their children to the Department of Human Health and Services, and be tried in a court of law. Although this decision was reversed two years later, and only after extreme criticism from around the globe, its effects still carry on today as the government struggles to find a way to reunite all the lost children with their families, and there are still risks that some children may never see their birth parents again.

 

Opinions on the topic

 

            There are two dominant opinions on what the next step in immigrant policy should be: continue the deterrent practices or completely revamp the current immigration policies. On the continuation side of the spectrum, Kevin Williamson, a writer for the conservative newspaper The National Review, supports the practices in his article “Enforce Immigration Law or Change It” arguing that the Trump administration chose the correct form of punishment and likening the removal of children to the removal of any child from an American citizen that commits a crime and is given jail time. He takes the stand of criticizing the parents for placing their children in the predicament and calls out what he believes to be the hypocrisy of popular denouncers, such as Time Magazine and Bill Clinton, who have called out Trump’s policies but turned a blind eye when past presidents took similar actions. The critical aspect Williamson’s article does not account for is the lack of guarantee that these ‘criminals’ will ever see their children again. If the U.S. makes a major decision to remove children from their rightful parents, they should also have a plan of action to return these children once their parents have gone through their due process. Without taking the consequences of their action into consideration, the government has horribly failed at their job.

            On the complete opposite side of the spectrum lies Nicholas Kristof, a Human Rights writer and opinion columnist for the New York Times, who discussed the dark side of Trump’s zero toleration policy in his article “Trump Immigration Policy Veers from Abhorrent to Evil.” Focusing on the personal accounts of those affected by Trump’s policies, Kristof includes the story of a Salvadorian woman who followed the procedure to request asylum by peacefully arriving at the border only to be stripped of her children and hear of them being placed in the foster home system. He also discusses the serious psychological effects of separation and calls it a human rights issue, implying that the government’s actions are inhumane. Kristof’s article contains the perfect balance of anecdotal and factual information, calling out the government for not fully researching its actions before taking them and requesting for them to take responsibility. In my opinion, his article perfectly captures everything that is wrong with modern U.S. immigration policies towards their border countries.

 

Impacts of family separation

 

            Even when families willingly separated in hopes of better lives, the outcomes were quite harmful to their wellbeing. Research conducted between 2003 and 2007 on Mexican serial migrants studied the effects of purposeful family separation on the stress levels and function levels of their family, focusing on an urban low-income community sample of Mexican immigrant parents who resided in the US while their children stayed in Mexico. In every case, parents hoped to build enough financial stability to establish themselves in the country and move their children to the U.S. to increase their family’s quality of life, yet they did not realize this reunification could take up to several years and in some cases never occur due to increasingly difficult immigration laws.

From the data collected, girls of the family were most heavily affected reporting higher depression rates with transnational parents. An association between depression levels and family functioning levels was found, linking higher depression levels with lower family functionality.[7]With mothers reporting higher rates of depression, family functioning fell to unhealthy levels and were nearly destroyed as children resented their parents for leaving them behind. Even at reunification, a negative reunification experience caused the lower family functioning to continue and made it much more difficult to rebuild bonds. If purposeful separation could carry effects this drastic, one can only imagine the magnitude of the effects of forced separation on the children involved.

Figure 3A group of children being held at the Paso Del Norte Port of Entry, located in the US-Mexico border inside Chihuahua State, Mexico. This picture was taken on June 20, 2018

            Although the government will not allow a clinical trial on children to test the effects of separation, child psychologists have likened it to the effects of severe childhood trauma. According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, childhood trauma was found to strongly correlate with increased risk of suicide attempts and drug addictions. In other words, these children are being set up for failure before even having the chance of better living conditions than their home countries[8]. In order for children to remain physically and emotionally healthy, they must maintain supportive relationships with their ‘primary caregivers,’ who are usually parents. When separated from their caregivers, they are at higher risk of psychological damage after passing the detachment phase, which consists of a month of no contact between them and their caregiver. This emotional trauma usually leads to high levels of anxiety and depression, which is extremely unfair to place on children who are too young to even comprehend the change in environment.

 

Potential solutions to the crisis

 

            The separation of families is an inhumane and irrational choice of punishment for families who seek to better their lives and chase the American dream. Instead, the focus should be placed on modernizing the legal entrance process for increased reliability and realism to accommodate the growing number of immigrant requests. There are many ways this can be done, such as increasing the number of work contracts given out depending on the open number of vacant jobs in certain areas that have not been filled in a specified timeframe. This is not to say that all of the blame lies on the U.S., as Mexico should also carry blame for not being able to properly meet the needs of its citizens. Given that Mexico is a border country, the US government should also direct more efforts to criticizing Mexico’s government for allowing the country to get itself into the condition it is in now while offering a helping hand to improve the condition and diminish the major reasons these citizens have to leave their home country. Seeing as the two governments have a history of helping each other at times of need, there should be no reason the two cannot cooperate to solve this large crisis.

 

[1]Adams, James Truslow., and M.J Gallagher. The Epic of America. Little, Brown, 1941.

[2]Navarro, Sharon Ann; Mejia, Armando Xavier (2004-01-01). Latino Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. ABC-CLIO. p. 23. ISBN 9781851095230.

[3]See the transcript of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's Interview With NPR for other intended effects of deportation

 

[4]See Social class and self-reported health status among men and women: what is the role of work organization, household material standards and household labour? for a detailed breakdown of the study

[5]Laird, Lorelei. “Meet the Father of the Landmark Lawsuit That Secured Basic Rights for Immigrant Minors.” ABA Journal, ABA Journal, Feb. 2016, www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/meet_the_father_of_the_landmark_lawsuit_that_secured_basic_rights_for_immig.

[6]Preston, Julia. “Judge Increases Pressure on U.S. to Release Migrant Families.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/us/judge-increases-pressure-on-us-to-release-migrant-families.html.

[7]Rusch, Dana and Karina Reyes. "Examining the Effects of Mexican Serial Migration and Family Separations on Acculturative Stress, Depression, and Family Functioning." Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, vol. 35, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 139-158. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/0739986312467292.

[8]CDC. “Violence Prevention.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 14 June 2016, www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/about.html.