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Immigration and Security
CHILDREN ON THE FRONTLINE
By Marisa Treviño, MATT Contributing Writer
Monday, August 6, 2007
The use of children on the frontlines of any conflict is a universally condemned tactic.
Whether it’s forcing the children to be child soldiers in an adult war, as pawns between divorcing parents or, as in the immigration debate, the faces before the cameras pleading for congressional mercy, the popular belief is that children should be left out of the fight between adults.
If it were only that easy.
When it comes to child soldiers and vindictive divorces, the answer is simple. Keep the children out of it while the adults battle away. After all, in both cases, the kids don’t benefit by being involved in those conflicts.
But when it comes to the immigration debate, it is another kind of battle altogether that has not just put undocumented children or children of illegally-arrived parents in the middle of the conflict, but has made them targets as well.
It is estimated that there are 4 million children who are born in the United States to, at least, one parent who is an undocumented immigrant.
Because of the stepped-up activity of the Department of Homeland Security in conducting job site raids and many local law enforcement officers now authorized to detain undocumented immigrants in the name of Homeland Security, all undocumented adults run the risk of deportation if discovered.
That would leave the children of these deported parents in a precarious situation. Without a stable breadwinner, caregiver, not to mention, loving parent, the quality of life, emotionally and physically, for these children who are U.S. citizens is in peril.
The natural argument is for the parents to just confess that their children would suffer without them and take the whole family back to their native country.
But when it has been years since the parent was in that country, the economic conditions of the country are so depressed that the parent can’t provide for his/her family and the educational system wouldn’t meet the needs of the children, well, choosing to stay rather than return is a no-brainer.
To underscore this point, a class action motion was filed in the Supreme Court in June on behalf of the group Four Million Kids. The motion’s objective is to stop the deportation of those parents who have one or more children who are legal U.S. citizens.
The most familiar face in this group is 8-year-old Saul Arellano whose mother, Elvira, brought nationwide attention to this problem when she refused to be deported back to her native Mexico.
Instead, this single mother who could not bear to be separated from her only child nor, at the same time, take him back to her poverty-stricken childhood home, accepted refuge at Adalberto United Methodist Church in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in the Chicago area.
This month marks Arellano’s one-year anniversary in sanctuary.
Though she’s been confined to the church, her message of how unfair it is to separate children from their undocumented parents is being carried throughout the country by her son.
Saul may be too young to understand the legal ramifications of illegal entry and deportation but he does understand how different his life would be without his mother or the only home he has ever known.
Another consequence of the immigration debate has been the access to higher education for undocumented college students.
Every year, about 65,000 immigrant students graduate from U.S. high schools. Many states, passing punitive laws targeting the undocumented, are also targeting these college-bound students by requiring them to pay out-of-state tuition, even if they grew up and attended school in the same state they want to attend college.
These students, who have been schooled in the civil rights history of this country and have learned from the examples of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez, are staging hunger strikes to protest this discriminating tactic.
The latest hunger strike took place in Phoenix, Arizona where students protested Proposition 300, which requires undocumented students to pay out-of-state tuition, at three times the amount of in-state tuition.
The students hoped to raise awareness for the passage of The DREAM Act, (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), a national law that would allow undocumented college students, who were brought to the U.S. as young children, to attend college at in-state tuition rates while also being provided a path to citizenship.
It is obvious that no one can better represent the interests of these students than they themselves.
So while nobody likes to see children getting caught in the middle of any conflict, when it has to do with their future — there are none more qualified.
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