Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520267184
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520267183
- Pub. Date:
- 09/01/2011
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520267184
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520267183
- Pub. Date:
- 09/01/2011
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520267183 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2011 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Writing Immigration
Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue
By Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Vivian Louie, Roberto Suro
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26718-3
CHAPTER 1
The Making of an Outlaw Generation
NINA BERNSTEIN
In the fall of 2004, my first year covering immigration for the New York Times, I met an eight-year-old girl named Virginia Feliz. Her last name means "happy" in Spanish, but she hated her name, she told me. She threw herself down on a couch in her family's apartment in the Bronx, beside her father, Carlos Feliz, a U.S. citizen who was born in the Dominican Republic. She declared: "I'm not happy, I'm sad. Because it's not fair that everybody else has their mom except me." In an article on the front page of the Times—one of the first, I believe, to highlight the breadth of this phenomenon—I wrote: "Virginia is part of the growing tribe of American children who have lost a parent to deportation." Virginia's forty-seven-year-old mother, Berly Feliz, had gone to the federal immigration headquarters in Manhattan on a supposedly routine visit to renew her work authorization. But an old deportation order had resurfaced, and Mrs. Feliz, who had lived in the United States for a decade after migrating illegally from Honduras, was quickly handcuffed and placed on a plane, with no chance to say goodbye.
By all reports Virginia Feliz had been a happy child before her mother's expulsion. Two months later, doctors said Virginia had a major depressive disorder marked by hyperactivity, nightmares, bed-wetting, frequent crying, and fights at school. In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Victor Sierra, the director of the Child and Adolescent clinic where Virginia was treated, made no bones about the underlying problem: "Absent mother, secondary to deportation." Virginia's case, on its own, might have made a compelling local feature story for the Metro desk, to which I was assigned. But at the time (and until mid-2006) I was the only reporter at the New York Times covering immigration. That fact itself may be evidence of what Roberto Suro, professor of journalism and public policy, criticizes as the episodic nature of immigration coverage. But it was also one reason I had lobbied for the beat on my return from a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. I knew I could use New York–based reporting as a framework for articles with national, even international, scope. My task was to put Virginia's case in a larger context.
I learned that 186,000 people were being deported from the United States in that year (2004), and 887,000 others had been required to make a "voluntary departure." In the 2010 fiscal year the annual "removals" figure reached a record 392,862. Yet no one kept track of exactly how many American children were being left behind. After consulting with demographers at the Pew Hispanic Center and the Urban Institute, however, I could confidently write that the number was in the tens of thousands. A spokesman for federal immigration services, William Strassberger, acknowledged the human fallout in a way that made Virginia's case resonate in the broader immigration debate and beyond. "There are millions of people who are illegally in the United States, and it's unfortunate, when they're caught, seeing a family split up," he said. "But the person has to be answerable for their actions." Parents had to decide whether to leave their American-born children with relatives or friends, or take them along when they were expelled from the country, he added, going so far as to evoke an image from the Nazi concentration camps: "People refer to that as a Sophie's choice situation," he told me.
Perhaps because I was steeped in the history of child welfare after writing The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care, I was struck not only by the scale of this largely unrecorded phenomenon of family disruption but also by the lack of any official nod to "the best interest of the child"—a concept enshrined in family law, if not in child welfare practice. There is a rich clinical literature on the psychological damage suffered by children who lose an attachment figure. More recent longitudinal studies of immigrant students offer nuanced discussions of the ways family separations caused by migration affect children who are belatedly reunited with their parents in the United States. But in journalistic terms what the Virginia Feliz article really demanded was an academic study specifically tracking the impact of parental deportation on children left behind in the United States. My hurried search turned up nothing on point.
This is the classic catch-22 facing a reporter ahead of the curve: the fresher the story, the more editors want corroboration from authoritative voices and scholarly evidence—and the less likely readily available scholarship fits the bill. What served me best in this instance was research on transnational migration that focused on children left on the southern side of the border, whose distress certainly echoed that of children like Virginia. Through a lucky break, I reached Leah Schmalzbauer, a social anthropologist who had conducted a two-year research project on families split between Honduras and the United States. She helped me broaden my context further: The numbers were expected to swell, Schmalzbauer noted, because families in poor countries like Honduras could no longer manage without remittances from the United States, and women were beginning to replace men as the primary migrants, filling growing demands in the United States for low-cost elder care, domestic work, and other service jobs. In an article framed by an individual narrative, this observation served to point to the larger economic forces at work. At the same time, Schmalzbauer gave me the strong quote. I needed to connect the dots to Virginia's mother, who had originally migrated to the United States when she could no longer afford to buy clothes, food, and school supplies for her son in Honduras, then thirteen.
I still needed other examples to show that Virginia's mental health problems were not an aberration. This was no easy task, given the imperatives of patient confidentiality and the stigma of deportation. Eventually I found Birdette Gardiner-Parkinson, the clinical director at the Caribbean Community Mental Health program at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn, who described similar cases. She said, "When children lose a family member this way, even though they may have a phone conversation with them, the physical separation feels like death." To advocates of greater restriction on immigration, I noted, this illustrated the painful consequences of poor enforcement in the past and pointed to the perils of guest worker programs like one then being proposed by President George W. Bush. "Once you let the person stay in the United States, it becomes extremely difficult in our society to make them go," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, arguing that a temporary worker program, if enforced, would only add to the number of families facing separation. "How are you going to keep them from falling in love, getting married and having U.S.-born children?" To critics of the sterner laws adopted in 1996, on the other hand, such cases showed that more systematic enforcement since September 11, 2001, was compounding the laws' contradictions and loss of discretion.
The case of Virginia's mother could be cited to support either side of the policy debate. Caught within hours of crossing the border in 1994, Mrs. Feliz had quickly been released on bond and then fled to New York. When she failed to show up in a Texas immigration court, she was ordered deported in absentia. But like the great majority of such orders, it was not pursued for years. And like millions of other illegal migrants, Mrs. Feliz was readily hired by Americans, first as a live-in housekeeper and then for low-wage factory work. Indeed, after her 1996 marriage to Carlos Feliz, when she applied for a green card, her lawyer said, federal immigration officials issued her an official work authorization several times and allowed her husband, as a U.S. citizen and new stepfather, to sponsor the teenage son she had left in Honduras for a visa. Now that son was a twenty-four-year-old lawful permanent resident with his own New York–born child, while his mother was back where she began, without a job or either of her children. "I don't have peace because I'm not with my little girl," she told me in Spanish, weeping in a telephone interview from Honduras. "I can't be without her—I have no life."
The article, which ran above the fold with a six-column photo of Virginia and her father, perhaps would be seen by the law professor Peter H. Schuck as framing immigration issues as "conflicts between powerless, underdog immigrants and powerful corporations and bureaucrats," instead of providing "a sympathetic explanation of the tradeoffs and of the constraints on the system." To Suro, it no doubt fits a pattern of telling immigration narratives that highlight individual agency and illegal entry, giving short shrift to pull factors. But I see the piece as a personal milestone in my coverage, the point when I recognized that children and families were actually at the cutting edge of the national immigration dilemma, though still at the margins of political discourse.
The article also marked my realization that prying basic information from secretive or indifferent government enforcement agencies would absorb an inordinate amount of my reporting time. Six years later, despite formal congressional queries and newspaper articles around the country that have highlighted such family separations, there is still no reliable public count of how many American-born children have lost a parent to deportation—or how many have been, in effect, deported along with their parents. In January 2009 the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security reported that collecting information on the U.S. citizen children of deported adults was still optional, so the agency was unable to answer a House subcommittee request for statistics on such children, whether they had been taken away or left behind, and how many had lost both parents to deportation. Even the incomplete data, however, showed that among 2.2 million people removed or deported between 1998 and 2007, more than 108,000 were parents of such children.
The legal and historical backdrop for Virginia Feliz's story, and for many of the human narratives I have told since then in the New York Times, was the sweeping immigration legislation enacted in 1996, which embraced harsher policies for both legal and illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, too. These Clinton administration laws, which mostly took effect in 1998, sharply curtailed defenses against deportation, severely narrowed judicial review that would allow consideration of individual circumstances, and raised civil and criminal penalties for immigration law violations. Shaped by the politics of ending welfare and by the war on drugs, the measures also barred legal immigrants from most government benefits and retroactively mandated the detention of all noncitizens who had ever committed a crime on a list of deportable offenses, which was expanded to include misdemeanors like drug possession and shoplifting. People facing deportation had no assurance of a lawyer. They could be held for years without recourse—a practice modified, though not eliminated, by the 2001 Supreme Court ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis, which held that indefinite detention is constitutional only if the detainee is dangerous and defined the limit generally as more than six months.
It was only after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, that the 1996 measures known as IIRIRA (for Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act) were vigorously enforced. Early on, the Bush administration explicitly resorted to immigration law as a weapon in its war on terror, rounding up hundreds of noncitizens and holding them for months with little or no effort to distinguish between genuine suspects and Muslim immigrants with minor visa violations. In 2003 the transfer of immigration services to a new Department of Homeland Security further blurred the boundaries between the administrative control of immigration, criminal law enforcement, and national security, and tapped billions of tax dollars to expand operations against noncitizens. In the mid-2000s the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm of the department grew increasingly aggressive as Bush tried, and failed, to pass an immigration overhaul that would satisfy conflicting demands for stricter enforcement, more temporary workers, and a path to citizenship for many illegal residents.
The signs of change from the Obama administration on immigration issues remained mostly that—signs rather than substance. Despite the administration's moratorium on large workplace raids—events that had drawn widespread negative publicity—there was no decrease in deportations of unauthorized workers caught more discreetly. Overall, following essentially the same strategy that failed under Bush, the Obama administration has pushed for a record number of deportations, to prove its enforcement bona fides, in the hope of winning legislative concessions in return. Though the Obama administration maintains that it wants to concentrate immigration enforcement on serious criminal offenders, it has embraced programs that are feeding record numbers of noncriminals, misdemeanants, and traffic offenders into detention and prosecuting record numbers of immigration-related offenses as federal crimes. These trends clash with the promise to transform immigration detention into "a truly civil" system. As this book goes to press, the midterm elections have decisively shifted the congressional balance of power toward Republicans and restrictionists, and the demise of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) has left Obama's immigration policy in shambles. But well before those events, the Democrats' discussion of comprehensive immigration reform increasingly emphasized enforcement. Parts of the existing system have so permeated local law enforcement and local economies that it is hard to envision any quick reversal. Even the longer-term prospect for mixed-status immigrant families remains guarded at best.
* * *
In this chapter I use my own reporting experiences, illuminated by the work of social scientists and legal scholars, as signposts to the shifting, conflicted landscape where such families have been raising a new generation of Americans. It is a place where fear has increasingly complicated the role of journalists and academics alike. In the end, I contend, it is the landscape that we all inhabit, whether we know it or not—a version of America that challenges our fundamental understanding of human rights and raises the specter of a kind of homegrown statelessness. In my experience one of the key features of this landscape is the ballooning immigration detention system. Detainees are often held for months, shuttled across the country from one lockup to the next, with little access to legal help or proper medical care and with almost none of the due process safeguards that people who watch Law & Order take for granted.
Catherine Dauvergne, a professor of migration law at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, has summarized the vulnerability of such unauthorized migrants in all Western countries: "They are confronted with legal regimes where, generally speaking, the state agents have more powers than the police and individuals have fewer rights protections than criminal suspects." Few would contest Dauvergne's observation that we are in the midst of a worldwide crackdown on extra-legal immigration. She reads it as a response to globalized threats to national sovereignty, noting that when physical borders are not effective at bolstering assertions of national sovereignty, "a strong policy stance against 'illegals' is" because "the label 'illegal' ensures exclusion from within."
In the United States, certainly, exclusion from within has become a growth industry. Immigration detention, now funded by Congress at the rate of $2.4 billion a year, is a shadowy conglomeration of profit-making prisons, county jails, and federal detention centers that holds more than 407,000 over the course of the year, churning through some 31,000 beds. That's more than triple the number a decade ago. And I would argue that the reach of detention and deportation is much greater now than even these numbers suggest. An escalating fear that their own families could be next permeates many immigrant communities across the country. Fear radiates from publicized events, like the wholesale workplace roundups that spurred public outcry, legal resistance, and recently a quiet moratorium. But just under the public radar is a much more pervasive crackdown that has not let up under Obama—in predawn home raids, traffic stops, and local sweeps that make it dangerous for members of millions of families just to drive to work, take a train, or go to sleep. It can be risky, for example, simply to live in an immigrant neighborhood in a house or apartment where a previous tenant may have had an old deportation order. Immigration agents may show up at the door with a photograph of someone who hasn't lived there for years, roust people from bed to demand papers, and take away in handcuffs anyone who cannot produce the right documents. In the aftermath of such raids, relatives, employers, even lawyers have to struggle to find out where those detained are being held.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Writing Immigration by Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Vivian Louie, Roberto Suro. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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