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Jewish World Review Augus 16, 2005 / 11 Av, 5765 When parents' illegal acts hurt their kids By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I've discovered a new form of parental neglect. To my mind, that's what it amounts to when undocumented immigrants leave their similarly undocumented children vulnerable to the precariousness of the U.S. immigration system.
Consider the sad tale of four high school students from Arizona who wound up in a deportation hearing after immigration officials learned that they had been brought into the United States illegally many years earlier. The four students — Jaime Damien, Yuliana Huicochea, Oscar Corona and Luis Nava — came to the attention of immigration officials in June 2002 while on an excursion near Buffalo, N.Y. One of the students suggested visiting Niagara Falls in Canada and a teacher-chaperone asked immigration agents whether the students could return to the United States even though they only had their student IDs. After agents looked into the immigration status of the four students, it was off to a deportation hearing.
I accept that. These kids were in the United States illegally and, under the law, once immigration agents determined that fact, the kids were fair game to be deported.
One person who didn't accept it was U.S. Immigration Judge John Richardson, who dismissed the case. Richardson said he was concerned about what initially caused the agents to question that the students had a legal right to be in the United States. After listening to testimony from the students — including a claim that a Border Patrol supervisor told them that they might "blend in" in heavily Hispanic Arizona but not in Buffalo — the judge concluded that it was the fact that the students were Hispanic that caused the agents to give them a second look. In U.S. immigration law, one's ethnicity is not considered adequate cause for questioning one's legal status. And so last month, the students were set free.
Then there was the group of children in Arkadelphia, Ark. — as many as 30 of them, some as young as 3 months old — who this summer were stranded and left without their parents after immigration agents raided a poultry plant and hauled the parents away to face deportation.
Some of those arrested were able to call friends or relatives and make arrangements for their children to be picked up, but others were not. A local church stepped in and tried to sort it out. At first, the spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans said that agents asked each person arrested if they had children, and they all said "no." Later, the spokesman altered his story and said that some of those arrested told agents that their children were staying with relatives. That's in line with current Border Patrol policy, which places children in the care of relatives when their parents are picked up.
Still, Arkadelphia Mayor Charles Hollingshead was sympathetic to the plight of both the parents and the children.
Let me explain. It's because Mommy and Daddy were what Uncle Sam calls illegal immigrants. As such, they put themselves in jeopardy every time they left home and went out in public. And worse, they also put their children in jeopardy. Ditto for the parents of the Arizona Four, who smuggled their children into this country as toddlers and let them live here for over a decade without protecting them with the cloak of legal residency.
Some people will find it easy to blast the government for taking what they would consider a heavy-handed approach to enforcing immigration law.
But that's nonsense. The real blame lies with the parents. In both cases, the parents came here illegally — and that was bad enough — but they compounded that irresponsible act by continuing to live here illegally. They should have done whatever they could to convert their status and obtain legal residency for themselves and their children. The process can be long and expensive, and it may even require people to do something they might not normally want to do: send less money home to relatives in Mexico and concentrate instead of caring first for their families in the United States. That's the way it ought to be. President Bush likes to say that family values don't stop at the U.S.-Mexico border. He's right. But nor should they disintegrate once people cross the border illegally.
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