How Today's Immigration Enforcement Policies Impact Children, Families, and Communities: A View from the Ground

What happens to children when their parents are deported? How do these deportations, now more numerous than ever, affect families and the communities in which they live? This report looks at how immigration enforcement shapes family life in the United States, both among immigrant and mixed-status families, and in their wider communities.Even as the United States has failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the past decade, it has increasingly taken a hardline stance on immigration enforcement, particularly in targeting unauthorized immigrants living in the country.The number of immigrants removed has steadily risen, from close to 190,000 deportations in 2001 to close to 400,000 per year in the past four years. Even more troubling, in the first six months of 2011 alone, more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizen children were deported.With more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country, these deportations affect a wide swath of the population, including the undocumented and the citizen alike. Undocumented immigrants do not live separate and walledoff lives from the documented, but instead live side by side in the same communities and in the same families. A total of 16.6 million people currently live in mixed-status families -- with at least one unauthorized immigrant -- and a third of U.S. citizen children of immigrants live in mixed-status families.Additionally, having citizen children or even being the primary provider for U.S. citizen children is little help in removal proceedings: A recent report by the NYU School of Law's Immigrant Rights Clinic found that between 2005 and 2010, 87 percent of processed cases in New York City of individuals with citizen children resulted in deportation.As individuals face the threat of deportation, ripple effects split families and entire communities apart. We argue in this report that deportations break families up and have a wider effect on the community as a whole -- not just the individual and the family involved

Negotiating daughterhood and strangerhood: retrospective accounts of serial migration

Most considerations of daughtering and mothering take for granted that the subjectivities of mothers and daughters are negotiated in contexts of physical proximity throughout daughters’ childhoods. Yet many mothers and daughters spend periods separated from each other, sometimes across national borders. Globally, an increasing number of children experience life in transnational families. This paper examines the retrospective narratives of four women who were serial migrants as children (whose parents migrated before they did) . It focuses on their accounts of the reunion with their mothers and how these fit with the ways in which they construct their mother-daughter relationships. We take a psychosocial approach by using a psychoanalytically-informed reading of these narratives to acknowledge the complexities of the attachments produced in the context of migration and to attend to the multi-layered psychodynamics of the resulting relationships. The paper argues that serial migration positioned many of the daughters in a conflictual emotional landscape from which they had to negotiate ‘strangerhood’ in the context of sadness at leaving people to whom they were attached in order to join their mothers (or parents). As a result, many were resistant to being positioned as daughters, doing daughtering and being mothered in their new homes

State Immigration Policies: The Role of State Compacts and Interest Groups on Immigration Legislation

US states are active in enacting immigration policies, which vary widely and have substantial impact on the lives of immigrants. Our understanding of what produces these divergent state laws remains limited. Qualitative research demonstrates the importance of a 2010 immigration compact, supported by a powerful religious organization, in shaping immigration policies in Utah, and the Utah Compact was held up as a model for other states. But is the experience of Utah applicable across other states? We test the effects of compacts and interest groups on immigration policy adoption across all 50 states between 2005 and 2013. Our findings suggest that compacts are actually associated with more restrictive immigration policy. Although states with compacts are more likely to pass inclusive immigration laws, these are counterbalanced by higher numbers of exclusive laws. Both religious and non‐religious interests groups are associated with policy, but they do not explain the effects of compacts

Engaged parenting, gender, and children's time use in transnational families : an assessment spanning three global regions

Funding support for this study is from Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE2015‐T2‐1‐008); Hong Kong Research Grants Council through its General Research Fund (Project 17606815); Wellcome Trust UK (GR079946/B/06/Z and GR079946/Z/06/Z).Global circuits of migration regularly separate parents from children. How families navigate this separation has changed markedly. The sharp decline in the cost of international communication makes possible new forms of transnational parenting. In many contexts, migrants are now actively engaged parents, involved in decisions, knowledgeable of children's schooling, employment, and activities, and in some cases, even conversant face‐to‐face with children via videoconferencing. These practices, however, are not universal. We use data from surveys in 3 countries to document the frequency and variability of intensive, engaged transnational parenting in the diverse global regions of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We then ask whether the organisation of children's lives—specifically, time allocated to school homework, leisure, and household chores—varies by the degree to which migrant parents stay connected to sending homes. The gender of the migrant parent, stay‐behind caregiver, and the gender of the child emerge as explanatory factors for engaged parenting and children's time use. However, and unexpectedly, in the Philippines, migrant mothers are less likely to practice engaged parenting. In sending households, girls in two of the three countries spend more time doing household chores than boys, but parental migration does not mitigate this difference. Although we find some evidence of more traditional gender practices, we also find exceptions that suggest potentially fruitful avenues for future research.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Emerging Perspectives on Children in Migratory Circumstances: Selected Proceedings of the Working Group on Childhood and Migration June 2008 Conference

The pieces you see in this e-book provide rich data from the lives of migrant children and sometimes their families. Chantal Tetreault’s piece among transnational Algerian teen girls in Paris and Kendall King’s study in Ecuador are linguistic in focus, bringing up the ways that performance in language is part of the practice of immigrant experience (Tetreault) and highlighting how regard for globalization and attention to language are deeply intertwined for immigrant communities (King). Most of the pieces provide in depth points of view from child migrant perspectives—data that is often difficult to obtain and portray sensitively. Child-centered data is exceptionally valuable in helping us to grasp the micro-forces by which childhood is changing through migration and how children experience or activate agency under trying conditions. Laure Bjawi-Levine among Palestinians in Jordan, Lauren Heidbrink among Spanish speakers in immigration detention in the U.S., and Jill White among Mexican children in U.S. labor and schooling environments demonstrate ways in which children’s self-understanding is constrained by state and economy in ways that determine a marked life course. Kanwal Mand’s also deeply child-centered analysis shows us how migrant childhoods can be notably shaped and sometimes constrained largely by urban housing and schooling environments, in this case for Pakistani second-generation children in London. Cati Coe’s interviews with informants in Ghana, and Catríona Ní Laoire’s study on return Irish migrants examine strains across the generations that affect the emotional management of families and individuals to handle the spatial and temporal challenges of migration. And finally, Michelle Moran-Taylor provides a rich analysis of the gendered and socioeconomic strategies that families use to negotiate the challenge of child-rearing in the home area when families are geographically separated, drawing especially on data from Guatemala

‘The Internet Is Magic’: Technology, Intimacy and Transnational Families

Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and qualitative research, I argue that the visual register in particular modes of communication technology like Skype and Facebook ushers in a different quality of relationships for transnational families. Most participants in this study are undocumented immigrants unable to return to their families for long periods of time because of legal consequences that will ban them from coming back and working in the USA. On the other hand, their families in the Philippines cannot visit the USA without proper documentation. The economic necessity of working abroad and legal conditions deter family reunification. Consequently, since these families are separated their only means of sustaining their relationships is through communication technology. The new mediums of communication, given their innovations in visuality, frequency and access to one another’s digital lives, present complicated issues as well as different forms of intimacy for members in a transnational family

Sending Granny to Chiang Mai: debating global outsourcing of care for the elderly

This article ties in with existing discussions on global care chains, family separation and the devaluation of social-reproductive work. We explore the new trend of outsourcing care for the elderly to countries with lower wages. We base our analysis on the debate in the German press and supplement it with insights from ethnographic field observations in two care homes in Thailand. We identify a discourse of abandonment, which shows how outsourcing the care of the elderly unsettles the privilege of sedentarism that is often taken for granted in the Global North. Furthermore, the newspaper articles tend to villainize people who seek care for their loved ones abroad. We argue that both discourses foster a neoliberal rationale of individualized responsibility and obfuscate the deep systemic roots of the care crisis in the Global North. However, by extending the discussion on outsourcing care for the elderly beyond the dominant media discourses, we envisage a rich potential for provoking political debate on the revaluation of care

Ageing and Long-Term Care Planning Perceptions of Hispanics in the USA: Evidence from a Case Study in New London, Connecticut

This paper explores the ageing attitudes and long-term care planning behavior of adult Hispanics in New London, Connecticut, a town with 30 thousand inhabitants that is rapidly ageing. We conducted six focus groups and had 37 participants share their ageing perceptions and long-term care needs. Our main findings suggest that informal care arrangements are vulnerable and unsustainable especially since women have historically and disproportionately provided most family eldercare even at their own personal and financial expense. Though male participants expected their female relatives to care for them when they age and need personal assistance, female participants did not necessarily expect the same from their relatives including their daughters. Also, both formal and government long-term care systems lack cultural competence and can be prohibitively costly. Therefore, Hispanics plan for ageing within their circles of family care and their resilience in a context of cultural exclusion and socio-economic disadvantage epitomizes strong intergenerational values. These support networks may help explain why may outlive whites (the Hispanic paradox ) who, on average, have higher wealth and education levels. Long-term care planning is a complex process that cannot be relayed to families only. Adequate training for family members from other relatives, and from private and government entities to appropriately convey this type of planning is vital to ensure that Hispanic families understand their options