The Obama administration's proposal for changes to deportation is good news for the estimated 1.4 million undocumented minors and youth who could benefit from it. Or is it?
The announcement — in lieu of more substantial Dream Act legislation — gives undocumented youth a reprieve from deportation and the chance to apply for a temporary work visa.
But the process needs clarification. This type of administrative decision can be overturned just as easily as it was announced.
It is likely to do little, if anything, to fix an immigration system that has created much disarray for America's children.
As in a dysfunctional family, caught up in a bitter divorce, the true casualties of a flawed immigration policy are children, both the 1.4 million undocumented youth and the 4.5 million citizen children of the undocumented. Mommy and daddy have forgotten the children while stubbornly clinging to opposing ideologies about who deserves to be an American.
Today's U.S. immigration system hits children with a double whammy. First, changes in immigration policy in 1996 under the Clinton administration (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act) in combination with those from the earlier 1986 law (Immigration Reform and Control Act), wiped out pathways to legalization, most acutely for those who have entered without inspection.
This means that young U.S. citizens hold no hope that their undocumented parents, or siblings, will ever obtain legal residency no matter how long they continuously live in the United States, whom they marry or how successful they are in their jobs.
The 4.5 million U.S. citizen children who live in mixed-status families — those in which a member is undocumented — cannot enjoy the rights of their citizenship.
Their legal guardians cannot become citizens, nor can they apply for an intermediate legal status that would allow them to work or to drive a car, essential tasks in parenting.
The second whammy of the current immigration system arises from the threat of deportation. The Obama administration has deported a record high of nearly 400,000 per year. In the first six months of 2011 alone, 46,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported. Deportation is scary, yet it is the threat of deportation that most profoundly affects children.
I have interviewed more than 100 children in immigrant families. Nearly all described fears of family separation.
Consider the 6-year old daughter of undocumented parents who told me that she feels scared that her parents are immigrants, "because if I am here and my mom goes to Mexico, I am going to be sad because I would miss her."
Or there is the 10-year-old U.S. citizen whose mother has severe kidney disease and receives dialysis biweekly. She thinks that her family is going to have to go back to Mexico someday, where her mother would not survive without the lifesaving treatment she receives.
My research shows that young children's heightened awareness of legality doesn't mean that they understand immigration law. Many, in fact, equate immigration with illegality.
I also find that children associate a stigma with immigration. They tell me that they prefer their peers do not know their parents are immigrants, like the 10-year-old son of a U.S.-born citizen mother who told me he hides the fact that his father is a Mexican immigrant.
The actions of the DREAMers who have come out as unashamed and undocumented are commendable. That President Barack Obama has heard their pleas is admirable. But America's children will continue to suffer under the current immigration system unless real reform is enacted.
The brave cries of undocumented youth have not been enough to move politicians out of deadlock. How about the tears of the U.S. citizen children who grow up afraid that their parents will be deported?
What about the shame children now feel to have immigrant parents? Is this not a sad state for a country built by the children of immigrants?
We need to stop inhumane deportations. The future of America's children depends on it.
Joanna Dreby is an assistant professor of sociology at the University at Albany and author of "Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children."