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

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

Transnational Motherhood and the Production of Subjectivity: Experiences of migrant Brazilian women living in London

This study explores how transnational motherhood is experienced by a group of Brazilian women participating in the global care chain. Our analysis indicates that transnational motherhood is an experience ripe with contradictions and emotional constraints. On one hand, transnational motherhood can subjugate women for not conforming to conventional motherhood norms. On the other hand, the migratory experience allows women to (re)negotiate their maternal roles, producing new meanings for care and mothering practices

Everyday Illegal When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families

What does it mean to be an illegal immigrant, or the child of immigrants, in this era of restrictive immigration laws in the United States? As lawmakers and others struggle to respond to the changing landscape of immigration, the effects of policies on people's daily lives are all too often overlooked. In Everyday Illegal, award-winning author Joanna Dreby recounts the stories of children and parents in eighty-one families to show what happens when a restrictive immigration system emphasizes deportation over legalization. Interweaving her own experiences, Dreby illustrates how bitter strains can arise in relationships when spouses have different legal status. She introduces us to "suddenly single mothers" who struggle to place food on the table and pay rent after their husbands have been deported. Taking us into the homes and schools of children living in increasingly vulnerable circumstances, she presents families that are divided internally, with some children having legal status while their siblings are undocumented. Even children who are U.S. citizens regularly associate immigration with illegality. With vivid ethnographic details and a striking narrative, Everyday Illegal forces us to confront the devastating impacts of our immigration policies as seen through the eyes of children and their families. As legal status influences identity formation, alters the division of power within families, and affects the opportunities children have outside the home, it becomes a growing source of inequality that ultimately touches us all.Cover -- Everyday Illegal -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Prologue -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Legal Status in Family Contexts -- 2. Nervios: On the Threat of Deportation -- 3. Stuck: Dependence in Intimate Relationships -- 4. It's Not Fair: The Pecking Order in Immigrant Families -- 5. Stigma: Illegality in Different Immigrant Neighborhoods -- 6. Conclusion: Reframing Illegality -- Appendix: Talking to Kids: Methodological Issues -- Notes -- References -- IndexWhat does it mean to be an illegal immigrant, or the child of immigrants, in this era of restrictive immigration laws in the United States? As lawmakers and others struggle to respond to the changing landscape of immigration, the effects of policies on people's daily lives are all too often overlooked. In Everyday Illegal, award-winning author Joanna Dreby recounts the stories of children and parents in eighty-one families to show what happens when a restrictive immigration system emphasizes deportation over legalization. Interweaving her own experiences, Dreby illustrates how bitter strains can arise in relationships when spouses have different legal status. She introduces us to "suddenly single mothers" who struggle to place food on the table and pay rent after their husbands have been deported. Taking us into the homes and schools of children living in increasingly vulnerable circumstances, she presents families that are divided internally, with some children having legal status while their siblings are undocumented. Even children who are U.S. citizens regularly associate immigration with illegality. With vivid ethnographic details and a striking narrative, Everyday Illegal forces us to confront the devastating impacts of our immigration policies as seen through the eyes of children and their families. As legal status influences identity formation, alters the division of power within families, and affects the opportunities children have outside the home, it becomes a growing source of inequality that ultimately touches us all.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries