Paying the Price for Our Parent's Deportations, Then and Now
New America Media, Commentary, Ruby Takanishi, Posted: Nov 29, 2007
Editor’s Note: There are approximately five million U.S. children with at least one undocumented parent. Minors bear the impact of immigration raids that end up detaining and deporting their parents, according to a new report issued by the National Council of La Raza. This is a civil rights and human rights issue, writes Ruby Takanishi, president of the Foundation for Child Development, which released a similar report All Our Children? The Health and Education of Children of Immigrants. IMMIGRATION MATTERS regularly features the views of the nation’s leading immigrant rights advocates.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the FBI arrested my grandfather in Hawaii. He was detained, incarcerated and not permitted to return home until World War II ended. Kazuichi Takanishi had a large family, including two sons who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. His wife and younger sons, including my father, were left to support themselves. The psychic wounds to his children resulting from his lengthy incarceration may have healed, but this generation is now reliving that trauma.
When I first learned that workplace raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) involved families with children, I connected these contemporary raids with my family’s experience and that of other Japanese immigrants immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Issei (first-generation immigrants) were rounded up and thrown into jails or makeshift camps. Their families did not know where they were or when they would return. Living in limbo – and the mental trauma that this caused – was the common experience for the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and their parents who were rounded up and put into internment camps erected in remote areas of the country, beginning in 1942.
The Urban Institute, supported by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), recently released a study documenting the immediate and long-term suffering of young children as a consequence of their parents’ arrests and subsequent detentions and deportations as a result of ICE workplace raids. There are an estimated five million U.S. children with at least one undocumented parent. The NCLR study shows that raids at three different sites resulted in the arrest of 900 adults and 500 children being left behind, some of them infants and toddlers.
The responses to the study are revealing. Those who oppose “illegal immigration” claim that the families are responsible for their children’s well-being. They and their children must pay the price of their illegal immigration to the United States.
These findings need to be framed as a civil rights and a human rights issue. It is a civil rights issue because workplace raids obviously target certain groups: they take place in rural areas, in worksites with large concentrations of Mexican and Central American workers who can easily be deported. Not all so-called “illegal” immigrant groups are targeted in ICE raids. A similar situation existed for German and Italian Americans in World War II, who were not rounded up like the Japanese. Racism certainly operated as a factor in selective arrests then and now.
As a human rights issue, immigrants – whatever they are labeled: aliens, undocumented, unauthorized, or illegal – have always come to the United States to seek a better life, economically and socially, for themselves and their children. As the leader of opportunity in the world, the United States must reform its immigration policy and take into account the universal need that people have to seek a better life. If not, our nation and its future as a strong democracy will pay the price: We will see further erosion of civil and human rights in the United States, the country that symbolized hope to so many individuals and families.
Listen to an UpFront interview with Miriam Calderon of NCLR on the Report on Children of the Undocumented
Related Stories
Congress Hears About Inadequate Health Care for Detained Immigrants
Claiming a Public Space -- Undocumented Youth Come Out of the Closet
Don’t Look to Democrats for Immigrant Rights
Page
1 of 1
|
User Comments
Luis Boche on Dec 07, 2007 at 06:39:52 said:
To:Taylor
YOU HATER ON MEXICAN YOU WISH YOU WERE US!!!!!!!!!
Guadalupe Cruz on Dec 07, 2007 at 06:35:40 said:
To:Taylor
You should be thankful we're here we make your community a better place!!!! And why are you going to be telling us to leave you need to learn how to be more respectful and if u cant i can tell you wernt raised very nicely!!!!AND YOU KNOW WHAT IM MEXICAN AND IM PROUD OF IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
marisol ortega on Dec 05, 2007 at 06:54:13 said:
Mexican should be able to live here because we have the right to and besides we're the ones who build your homes and schools and stuff so yall should be thankful for that!!!!!
marisol ortega on Dec 05, 2007 at 06:54:12 said:
Mexican should be able to live here because we have the right to and besides we're the ones who build your homes and schools and stuff so yall should be thankful for that!!!!!
Domingo T. Arong on Nov 29, 2007 at 19:17:31 said:
To Taylor:
-->Americans should follow the laws.
An American law declared: "Citizens of the Philippine Islands shall owe allegiance to the United States."
But that same law declared that Citizens of the Philippine Islands "shall be regarded as if they were aliens."
The Philippine Islands was a territory over which the United States exercised the rights of sovereignty and jurisdiction--and where waterboarding flourished during the pacification of the islanders.
This provision of law was unbelievably phrased in the classic SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD--"as if ... were," which means that what it declared was a supposition contrary to fact.
So, being declared by a supposition contrary to fact that citizens of the Philippine Islands were to "be regarded as if they were aliens," they were now subject to expulsion and exclusion under U.S. immigration laws.
But in U.S. v Rhodes (decided the same year the 39th Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866), "All persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens."
Alas, since nationality attaches AT BIRTH (a person can only be born once), these "little brown brothers" were never afforded the opportunity to renounce or preserve their citizenship AT BIRTH and they have remained, to this day, STATELESS AT BIRTH, disowned by their country they owed allegiance to AT BIRTH.
But that's American law, and it should be followed.